by cidaut | Nov 7, 2014 | Sin categoría
The final conference of the European RESTRAIL project (Reduction of Suicides and Trespasses on Railway property) was held to present the lessons learnt within the project, its final results and the future way forward.
The European RESTRAIL (Reduction of Suicides and Trespasses on RAILway property) project was brought to a close on September 18th 2014 at the UIC premises at Paris, France. This was the occasion to learn more about this successful project, its results and the future way forward. Around 100 participants from Europe as well as other countries (such as USA and Australia), attended the final conference of this European project. RESTRAIL aimed at reducing the occurrence of suicides and trespasses on railway property and the costly service disruption caused by these events. One central objective of RESTRAIL was to provide the rail industry with the analysis of cost-effective prevention and mitigation measures as well as with recommendations and guidance materials to optimise the implementation of these measures. The final outcome is a toolbox to support the decision makers in taking practical steps to reduce suicides and trespasses and to mitigate the consequences once that these events occur.Mr Jean-Pierre Loubinoux, UIC Director-General, delivered the opening speech of these conferences, highlighting the role of different experts working together on both societal and technical issues focused on the reduction of trespassing and suicides. Afterwards, Mrs Ann Billiau, INFRABEL General Director, gave a keynote focused on an example from Belgium, explaining that it has the more dense and heavy network in the world with easily accessible tracks and thus dramatic consequences. Mrs Billiau referred to the toolbox as a dynamic and evolutionary tool, where stakeholders could find a general guidance explaining how to analyse the measures and their implementation.
The Conferences followed through with the WP leaders’ presentations about different lessons learnt during the project referred to:
- Qualitative analysis of suicide and trespasses on railway property
- Assessment of measures targeted to reduce railway suicides and trespasses.
- Mitigation of Consequences by Improving Procedures and Decision Making
- Implementation and monitoring process of field tests
After these presentations, the most anticipated moment came with the Poster session. The results, obtained from each one of the evaluations, were presented by the responsible RESTRAIL partners. A total of 11 posters were shown during one and a half hour. The eleven evaluated measures were: warning signs and posters; societal collaboration to prevent railway suicide; gatekeeper training course for personnel working in a railway environment; gatekeeper course “Contact with a (possibly) suicidal person”; restriction of access to fast lines, using mid-platform fencing and other restrictions to access; education in schools for 8–11 year old children; video enforcement and sound warning; railway safety education programme¸ a combination of measures at Aydin station; Computer Based Training (CBT) Module for Responding Bodies to mitigate post-incident consequences and Forward Facing CCTV. CIDAUT presented the results obtained from the evaluation carried out together with ADIF at the stopping place of the University of Valladolid (Valladolid, Spain); where several warning signs and posters were implemented in order to know their effectiveness on the reduction of trespassers.
After the Poster session; the RESTRAIL toolbox was presented as the final output of the project. This guidance material has been designed in order to:
- Lead decision-makers through the process of selecting from the wide range available of preventative and mitigation measures
- Provide more detailed guidance on the implementation of those measures and provide a framework for collecting and structuring information in order to feed an accessible and documented database on implementation measures and efficiency across the rail community.
More information referred to this RESTRAIL toolbox is accessible at http://www.restrail.eu/toolbox/
Lastly, the Conferences concluded with an open discussion of some ideas concerning possible follow-up research activity. One of the most appreciated by those present was initiating new and more elaborated field tests in the future: some of the most promising measures could be selected and evaluated in longer field tests, in order to collect more reliable data and assess the beneficial effect achieved statistically.
The RESTRAIL project ended on September 30th, 2014, however the partners will continue to work together and organize periodic workshops, so that current and future partners can share the most recent knowledge and best practices from their countries.
For more information on the RESTRAIL project, please visit http://www.restrail.eu/ or contact juapla@cidaut.es.
by cidaut | Nov 7, 2014 | Sin categoría
The HITECO project is close to its end. Last 30th October the final workshop was carried out in ENEA facilities, near Rome. At this event, the project coordinator and several partners showed the most important tasks developed along the project and the main results obtained; insights about the future of the CSP sector, sealing systems for novel energy devices and “Industrial development driven by technology; Solar applications”, were some of the topics presented and discussed during the Conferences. Finally a technical tour was performed to show the new absorber tube placed on the test facilities and the testing operation results (http://www.hitecoproject.com/?p=971).
The last one and a half year of the project, its efforts have been focused on the development and validation of a prototype of the new concept of absorber tube for CSP that had been designed during the project. This new concept was been tested in a laboratory under off-sun conditions to analyze the thermal stability of the components and the behaviour of the new concept of vacuum chamber, providing good results in all the tests performed.
Finally, the new product was scaled and mounted on a CSP test facility placed at ENEA facilities near Rome to perform the on-sun tests of the product.
These test facilities are composed of a parabolic trough solar collector of 100m length and a molten salts management system used as heat transfer fluid along the tests. During the last year the project tasks have been focused on the manufacturing of a 100m length absorber tube to place it on those tests facilities, and the necessary efforts to adapt the supporting structure and the molten salts management system to be used to the new concept of the absorber tube.
These tasks were completed successfully completed and the system validation tests started at the beginning of last summer. At this moment, the main conclusions drawn are the following:
- The new concept of absorber tube has been validated, and likewise the following goals have been confirmed: the thermo-mechanical functionality, the ability to achieve high vacuum levels and keep them under different operating conditions.
- The first tests performed showned similar heat losses to those with current tube designs; the differentiating effect is focused on the analysis of the composition and pressure of the vacuum chamber and, on the other hand, the reduction of the heat losses through the absorber tube supports. Regarding performance, as the new tube concept, it has more effective solar collection area, it is expected that in the coming weeks the improvement in performance of the new tube design compared to current designs can be confirmed.
Thanks to the HITECO project, CIDAUT has gained knowledge and a valuable insight into the CSP technologies, and has developed and validated simulation methodologies to analyze the optical, thermal and thermo-mechanical behaviour of parabolic-trough solar collectors. On the other hand, a useful analytical tool to characterize the performance of absorber tubes in parabolic solar collectors has been carried out and has been validated using CFD simulation tools and experimental results.
by cidaut | Nov 7, 2014 | Sin categoría
ACOUTRAIN Final Conference:
“Virtual certification of acoustic performance for rolling stock”
Brussels (Belgium), 7th November 2014
The ACOUTRAIN project is a EU-funded European R&D project focussed on the development of procedures and calculation tools to simplify the present noise TSI noise test. The 3-years project has 15 European partners and its main objective is to reduce the time and costs associated to the TSI Noise conformity assessment by developing procedures for acoustic virtual testing. The project is coming to an end in December 2014 and ACOUTRAIN Final Conference on the 7th of November 2014 was the perfect opportunity to present the project results.
Programme:The workshop was held at the Thon Hotel Bristol Stephanie, Avenue Louise 91-93, B-1050 Brussels, and started around 9:00AM with a welcome speech from Dr. Philippe Citroën, Director General of UNIFE. Mr Jean-Marie Bodson, Technical Director of Standards & Regulations at Alstom Transport introduced the project together with the technical coordinator, Mr Nicolas Furio from UNIFE.The main results of ACOUTRAIN were presented during a full day event, structured in 5 main sections:
- Session 1 – Basic tools for virtual certification.
- Introduction to concepts of Virtual Testing
- Virtual Vehicle, process flowchart (WP1)
- Software definition + demonstration (WP4)
- Validation of software (WP4)
- Session 2 – Noise sources characterisation.
- Rolling noise: how to use TWINS; wheel roughness (WP2)
- Vehicle Source characterisation measurements (WP3)
- Integration effects (WP3)
- Session 3 – Methods related to virtual certification.
- Separation/transposition procedures (WP2)
- Simplified method (WP1)
- Specific situations, other metrics, use for
- END (WP1)
- Session 4 – Example application: NAT Case study.
- Measurement Campaign
- Modelling Concept
- Results
- Session 5 – Virtual testing within certification.
- Procedures: ACOUTRAIN proposals
- Discussion
- Summary of outcomes, open issues
- (Recommendations for future research)
The Final Conference was an opportunity to discuss about virtual certification. A dedicated session for questions and answers was opened in the last part of each session.
by cidaut | Nov 7, 2014 | Sin categoría
The EU’s flagship electromobility project, Green eMotion, has organised for the first time an electric vehicle rally from the Green eMotion demonstration regions to Brussels. Over the past few days, five teams – EdF (Strasbourg), ESB (Belfast), RSE (Milano), TÜV Nord (Hannover), and Verbund (VIenna) – drove their electric vehicles to Brussels, using different charging stations along the way. The tour culminated on september 18th with a high-level conference with the Vice-President of the European Commission and Commissioner for Transport Mr Siim Kallas. A parallel interoperability demonstration showed that the marketplace developed within the project now allows Europe-wide access to charging infrastructure.
“Green eMotion has achieved major milestones during the 3 ½ years of project work to enable the mass market roll-out of electromobility: Prototype implementation of a really scalable, open ICT system enabling Europe-wide access to charging infrastructure, development of necessary standards for electromobility and a roadmap for future standardisation work, detailed technical work (from grid impact studies to the evaluation of electric vehicles under real life conditions) as well as the preparation of guidelines and policies,” said Dr. Heike Barlag, Siemens AG, the project coordinator of Green eMotion.
Following the keynote speech by Vice-President Kallas on the future of electromobility in Europe and the view from the electricity industry presented by EURELECTRIC Secretary General Mr Hans ten Berge, Green eMotion representatives from partners Enel, IBM and RSE explained some of the project’s successes, including the demonstration of a truly interoperable electromobility system, the setting up of a marketplace for roaming throughout Europe, and the work carried out on standardisation.
As a second highlight of the event, Green eMotion partners demonstrated their developed interoperability solution with electric vehicles and charging infrastructure from different operators throughout Europe. The charging infrastructure for the demonstration was provided by EDF, Endesa, Enel, ESB, Iberdrola and RWE. The demonstration showed how users can easily charge their electric car independently from their local infrastructure operator. This is made possible via the Green eMotion marketplace platform provided by IBM, an open ICT infrastructure developed within the project that includes a clearinghouse service from SAP for roaming. This marketplace was also used during the Rally to Brussels when the teams – running cars from BMW, Nissan, Opel and Renault – charged with their own user-ID at the charging stations of other project partners.
Other working areas of the Green eMotion project addressed by speakers in the conference included the effect of electric vehicles on the power system, sustainable business models for electromobility, increasing the acceptance of electric cars, and evaluating and influencing their range. The presentations from this conference can be found on the Green eMotion project website www.greenemotion-project.eu.
About Green eMotion: The project’s 42 partners have joined forces to explore the basic conditions that are needed for Europe-wide electromobility. The primary goal of the project is to demonstrate an interoperable electromobility system with easy access to charging infrastructure all over Europe. Such a system is only feasible with standards that can be adopted internationally. To this end, practical research is being conducted in different demonstration regions all over Europe with the aim of developing and demonstrating a commonly accepted and user-friendly framework that combines interoperable and scalable technical solutions with a sustainable business platform. The project is funded by the EU and runs until February 2015. More information is available at: www.greenemotion-project.eu
by cidaut | Nov 7, 2014 | Sin categoría
The system named as “ILLUMETRIC”, aimed to assess street lighting facilities, was presented in September in the United Kingdom during “The Professional Lighting Summit” congress, organised by the Institution of Lighting Professionals (ILP).
The ILLUMETRIC system, developed by CIDAUT and whose services are currently being commercialized by CIDRO, was presented during the last “The Professional Lighting Summit” held in Solihull, near Birmingham. This is probably the most important event oriented to lighting professionals in the United Kingdom. The presentation of the system was done during two workshops, one each day of the congress, and attracted a very interesting group of assistants, including representatives of public administrations and private companies.
ILLUMETRIC uses a van equipped with a wide set of sensors and cameras conceived to perform surveys of street lighting facilities. The measures are registered with the vehicle in motion, driven at the speed of the roadway, which represents an enormous advantage with regards to traditional handheld measurement systems.
The system includes instrumentation to provide complete information about the levels of light and position of the luminaries, allowing advanced features like the creation of “light maps” or the inventory of light points. This information can be used in activities like energy efficiency audits, maintenance surveys, project acceptances, etc.
Beyond all doubt, ILLUMETRIC can be considered as one of the most advanced systems of its kind in the world, opening a whole field of opportunities related to the adequate use of energy to light our streets and roads.
Learn more about this system at www.illumetric.com.
Illuminance map with the levels of light measured by the ILLUMETRIC system and represented in Google Earth (image ©Google)
