Landslide is a dangerous phenomenon according to geomechanical viewpoint, being able to produce huge damages because of sliding and can involve structures and infrastructures. However, mechanical aspects are generally recognized since they provoke the above consequences. Environmental aspects related to breaking in the land must be considered. Land breaks or cracks allow outside water, not only from rain, to reach surface and subterranean aquifers. Contacts between external waters, maybe containing diverse pollutants, and aquifers, would be considered as source of contamination. The paper illustrates an experimental multi-temporal monitoring of landslides that have been taking place at Colletorto town (Italy). The proposed method, by means of dedicated instrumentation, and subsequent modeling, has permitted to output innovating approach.

SCADA systems have been used during the last years in order to control and supervise industrial processes within a long distance, thus considerably reducing the loss of information, apart from offering a higher speed and security of data. Nowadays, due to the fast development of Internet of Things, of wireless communication and of electronics, a better efficiency in industrial processes has been established, this being possible due to the use of specialized protocols and software, which, have been able to expand to house and building applications because of the easiness of their programming protocol and graphic interface, together with a low cost. The objective of this work is to show the different and mostly used control systems for applications in houses and smart buildings.

The present paper reports the preliminary results of a study carried out to characterize the thermal response of apple surface wax layer. The experimentation has been performed on three different cultivars of apple (Golden delicious, Fuji and Red delicious). The present study is part of a research project which final aim is to reproduce artificially bio-wax films in order to cover and protect fruits during their life cycle from the tree to the table. Wax is a natural substance which covers the surface of some species of fruits such as the apples. This wax layer protects the fruit against parasites, atmospheric agents, thermal excursions, moisture loss, mechanical damage and microbiological infections. These singular features are object of studies and research activities. Consequently, an interesting challenge of researchers and agronomists is to develop new synthetic substances obtained by natural extracts or essences.
In the proposed application case, the active thermography has been used in order to study the thermal response of the three apple varieties after a cooling process inside a climatic chamber. The thermographic images have been recorded during the heating process from 5 °C to 27 °C for 132 minutes. Consequently, the three heating rates have been compared. In this experimentation, the Fuji and Red apples have showed a slower heating rate due to the thicker wax layer. The emissivity has been measured for each apple and the whole experimentation has been carried under controlled environmental conditions to assure the repeatability and reproducibility of the experiment.
The results have allowed to define the main thermal features and characteristics of the wax layer for future investigation.

The electrical output of a photovoltaic system is often related to the plane-of-array global irradiance and the cell operating temperature. However, the spectral distribution of the irradiance also influences the system electrical behavior, through its coupling with the spectral response of the photovoltaic material employed. Since early in the 1990s, many authors have evaluated the spectral performance of different types of semiconductors under real operating conditions worldwide. For this purpose, different methods and indexes have been proposed. In this paper, the fundamentals of the spectral characterization of the photovoltaic materials are introduced and 3 available spectral indexes are reviewed. The analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of these indexes leads to the definition of a simple index, which has never been used in the literature. This index, named as Spectral Average Useful Fraction, could be suitable for a quick spectral evaluation of a photovoltaic system with the only requirement of knowing the average incident spectrum of the site and the absorption limit of the photovoltaic material. An extensive comparison with the 3 available indexes should be carried out in order to assess the usefulness of the proposed index. This will be the object of future works.

This work is related to the structural and dynamic analysis of vibrations tested in a model of building-like structure which is armed by a three-story building with a Tuned Mass Damper vibration absorber. The structure it is connected to an electromagnetic shaker, which excited the support of the structure, provides forces with a wide range of excitation frequencies, including some resonance frequencies of the structure. The vibration absorber is a typical passive absorber known as Tuned Mass Damper (TMD), located over the third story building to reduce the vibrations. The overall mechanical structure is modeled using Euler-Lagrange methodology. The passive control is synthesized to actively attenuate the vibration system response via the TMD substructure, caused by excitation forces of earthquake acting on the base of the structure to improve the performance of the system and reduce the effect of vibrations. Some experimental results are included to illustrate the overall system performance.