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Metrosea 2022 – International workshop on metrology for the…

The sea has always represented for man an essential vital resource. Since history origins, it has served as a fundamental element of the geopolitical landscape. It allows people to travel from one country to another and it is still intensively used for goods transportation. Moreover, the sea represents an extraordinary reserve of water and food for all the living beings of the earth. Therefore, nations must exercise common sense and responsibilities concerning the preservation of seas and oceans. Sea health is crucial for the survival of all human beings and environmental pollution and global warming could certainly affect negatively its condition. In such a context, MetroSea represents, since its first edition, an international meeting in which recent advances in the field of instrumentation and measurement are discussed, with the aim to increase the knowledge in the protection and preservation of the sea. The MetroSea workshop involves every year national and international experts from both institutions and academia in a discussion in the field of metrology for the marine environment.
The MetroSea 2022 edition will be held in Milazzo (Italy, Messina) from 3rd to 5th October 2022 and will be organized by the University of Messina. The general chairs are Prof. Pasquale Daponte from University of Sannio, Prof. Nicola Donato (Res4Net member) and Prof. Giovanni Randazzo, both from University of Messina. The workshop topics span from sensors and monitoring systems for the sea, to measurements for coastal and marine geology, passing through underwater ones. Authors are invited to contribute by submitting an extended abstract based on their original scientific research by May 31, 2022.
More information on the workshop topics and deadlines can be found on the official website.

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Nuclear Fusion – Unitus

In the Nuclear Fusion research field, EUROfusion is the European consortium for the Development of Fusion Energy, born in 2014 from the agreement to strengthen European collaboration on fusion research. Part of the EUROfusion programme, important to prepare the future ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) operations, is JET (Joint European Torus).
JET is a Tokamak, a nuclear fusion reactor with magnetic confinement, based at Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE), in Oxford, UK. It is the only tokamak in the world that can operate using the ideal fusion fuel: a mix of hydrogen isotopes, Deuterium and Tritium. The 2021 JET campaign with Deuterium and Tritium, designed also by EUROfusion, had different goals, and the most important was: “Demonstrate fusion power from 10 up to 15 Megawatts sustained for five seconds” breaking the record reached in 1997.
JET’s first world record, in 1997, concerned the generation of ~4.5 Megawatts of fusion power for 5 seconds by a sustained plasma, producing a total fusion energy of 22 Megajoules.
At the end of the 2021 experimental campaign, on December, JET’s researchers broke the previous record, reaching an important achievement, result of over 20 years of research, in which also UNITUS professors and researchers gave their contribution.
10 Megawatts of fusion power were generated by a sustaining steady D-T plasma for 5 seconds. The total amount of fusion energy released by the fusion process was 59 Megajoules, more than double of the previous case.
The record was announced on February 09, 2022. In this occasion the UKAEA’s CEO (UK Atomic Energy Authority that hosts JET) Prof. Ian Chapman said: “These landmark results have taken us a huge step closer to conquering one of the biggest scientific and engineering challenges of them all. […] It is clear we must make significant changes to address the effects of climate change, and fusion offers so much potential. We are building the knowledge and developing the new technology required to deliver a low-carbon, sustainable source of baseload energy that helps protect the planet for future generations. Our world needs fusion energy.”
This is an important demonstration of how the cooperation and collaboration can lead to beneficial results for all humanity.
In this video (YouTube link), published by UK Government channel, is present the announcement of the JET Deuterium-Tritium results.


For other information, please visit:

EUROfusion Article

Nature Article 

Science Article

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The new frontiers of measurement

#forensicscience #forensicmetrology #politecnicodimilano #expertwitnesses #engineering #forensic

Technical issues have been playing a relevant role in forensic practice and represent an important aid to those who administer Justice. The typical engineering methods represent a large part of the forensic sciences, and technical experts’ role has steadily gained importance in the last decades.
Justice has always sought certain means to assess the factual truth to render fair verdicts. To the investigators and triers of facts, science and techniques appear like the optimal tools to provide a certain representation of facts, based on scientific and irrefutable data.
Unfortunately, science and technique have their own limitations and they can only provide limited information on the events they model. This means that every decision taken based on a scientific judgment of facts has an intrinsic risk of being not fully correct, and it is important, from both the technical and ethical points of view, to consider such limitations.
The objective of this course is to frame the role of the technical experts inside the judicial proceedings and explain how the implicit doubts in the result of every piece of evidence collected through scientific and technical activities shall be quantified and presented to the triers of facts to explain them the risk of a wrong decision.
In this respect, forensic metrology is the branch of forensic science capable of providing a pondered answer to these issues not hiding the important, implicit limits of every technical assessment of the facts to the triers of facts, thus avoiding ethical and penal implications and will be covered by this course.

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