Dario Ticali

ESTIMATION OF AIR POLLUTANT EMISSIONS IN FLOWER ROUNDABOUTS AND IN CONVENTIONAL ROUNDABOUTS

Abstract The road pollutant emissions, above all in urban context, are correlated to many infrastructural parameters and to traffic intensity and typology. The research work on road junction geometry, carried out in European research centres, has recently allowed to design new road intersection types which are of undoubted interest, especially in terms of traffic functionality and safety, like the flower roundabouts (in which right-turn manoeuvres do not conflict with the circulating flow). The main objective of this paper is to propose a model for the estimation the capacity, delay, levels of service and the pollutant emissions into flower roundabouts. A comparative analysis between conventional roundabout and flower roundabout has been carried out in terms of CO, CO2, CH4, NO, PM2,5 and PM10 vehicular emissions, evaluated by mean of COPERT Software which is developed as a European tool for the calculation of emissions from the road transport sector.

Concept of a New Pluviometer for Metering Rainfall Erosivity

Rainfall is the main driver of several natural phenomena having a large impact on human activities. Its monitoring is then very important for natural disaster prevention and for the preservation of the environment. One important phenomenon is related to soil displacement due to rainfall impact. The intensity of physical soil degradation, detachment and transport of soil particles by raindrop splash and interrill erosion is largely controlled by rainfall characteristics. There is still a lot of debate as to whichparameter expresses the best rainfall erosivity. Due to the limited data ondrop-size distribution of natural rainfall and the time consuming nature of methods to obtain these data, rain erosivity parameters are commonly obtained from empirical relationships based on rainfall intensity. This paper describes an a new pluviometer able to measure several raindrop variables and assess rainfall kinetic energy at the impact with the ground. It enables one to measure drop size and drop velocity in real time and thus any parameter linked to rainfall erosivity. The pluviometer is based on the combination of optical and electrical sensors and it is based on cheap technologies in order to allow the easy distribution of several monitoring station on the analyzed area. A description of the device and of its sensor is presented in the present paper.