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Abstract The NDT methods currently used in aviation MRO are predominantly labour-intensive and time-consuming processes performed by human operators throughout the lifespan of an aircraft. These techniques are time-consuming, require perpetual training and are highly dependent on the operator’s skills. Thus, there is a growing need for more efficient, automated, and accurate NDT tools that will be able to provide faster and less labour-intensive assessments. This study presents a novel, non-contact, automated NDT scanning system under development, which aims to reduce the inspection time significantly. The proposed technique uses a non-contact, Lamb wave-based approach. A further essential step during the process is to use an automated positioning system. Thickness mapping and defect detection in metal and composite structures have been performed. A local thickness map in the order of 1 mm has been obtained through a fast-scanning process with comparable resolution to conventional inspection techniques. Overall, it is currently concluded that the proposed NDT scanner is a promising tool that potentially can reduce the inspection time while also having the potential to automate the damage assessment resulting in more efficient MRO inspection processes.

Please cite the following related publication: Ortega J, Meersman MFL, Aparicio S, Liébana JC, Anaya JJ, González M. Influence of stress level and damage on sonic tomography imaging and on the estimation of deformability properties of historic stone masonry. Construction and Building Materials 417,135285 (2024) (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.conbuildmat.2024.135285) Abstract: The paper evaluates the sensitivity of sonic tomography imaging of historic masonry structures to variations in stress level and damage. Six stone masonry walls with different geometries representative of historical typologies were constructed by a professional mason. A laboratory campaign was carried out, subjecting the walls to cyclic uniaxial compression tests. During the test, an automated sonic tomography system was used to inspect the wall under loading cycles of increasing amplitude, which led to obtain tomographic images during loading and compare them under different stress level and damage condition. The use of robotic systems was proved essentialto carry out the sonic inspections simultaneously to the compression tests. Results show that sonic wave propagation is not only sensitive to damage level, but also to the stress state. Thus, sonic tomography has the potential to be used to measure damage and stress level of masonry components over time, for example during renovationworks on an existing construction.

This article discusses the neglected dramatic works of Frances Burney and how they were overshadowed by her father's opposition to the theatre. Despite the publication of her Complete Plays in 1995, there has been little interest in examining the tragic aspect of Burney's work. "L’essenza e l’assenza. Il teatro di Frances Burney tra lungo palcoscenico e neverstage" adds a new dimension to the study of Burney's serious drama by focusing on Hubert De Vere, a pastoral tragedy written during Burney's years at court. Despite the apparent interest of John Philip Kemble, the greatest tragic actor of the day and longtime manager of R. B. Sheridan's Drury Lane, Hubert De Vere never saw the stage or the printed page, foreshadowing its subsequent critical eclipse. Burney continued to rewrite, reread and reflect on this text for the rest of her life, thus justifying my definition of the 'long stage.' A veritable intertextual and intermedial crucible, Hubert de Vere bears witness to the fault lines of the transformation of models and forms in Burney's dramaturgy, combining them within this neverstage, an imaginary stage on which Shakespeare, the eighteenth-century tragic tradition, Gothic drama and, not least, familiar anti-theatrical shadows dominate. This research was funded by the Horizon 2020 project 'Opening Romanticism: Reimagining Romantic Drama for New Audiences' (OpeRaNew) ID 892230, under the Horizon 2020 MSCA-IF-2019 programme. Francesca Saggini is the Principal Investigator of the project.

What are the effects and significance of inscribing an archive or group of documents in a heritage list? In light of the positive effects of digital technology on archival science, should all archives and past documents be considered “heritage,” or are some more significant than others? What are the implications and benefits of a heritage archive? Is creating a digital database of a specific archive considered part of heritage conservation? Is the term "heritagization" or "heritage making" a synonym for preservation or conservation? In this article, I will attempt to answer some of these questions from the point of view of premodern literature, drawing on recent researches in heritage studies, specifically in the subfield of "critical heritage studies. After briefly introducing the current state of heritage scholarship, I will present the definition of "textual heritage" that I developed during my most recent project. Secondly, to reflect on how the concept of textual heritage can affect our understanding of historical archives, I will present the case of the Hyakugo Archive of Toji Temple (Kyoto, Japan), a collection of 19,000 documents dating from the eight to the eighteenth century, which was inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World List in 2005 and has been fully digitized and made available to the public via the Internet. I will examine a particular historical event that occurred during the 17th century, which can be viewed as a re-birth of this archive as a cultural heritage and reflect on the implications of this event for the survival of the archive itself and its use today.

As administrações florestais espanhola e portuguesa colaboraram, no final do século XIX, para produzir um conjunto pioneiro de projetos de plantações florestais em vários territórios dunares. A silvicultura das dunas ocupava um lugar privilegiado no pensamento administrativo e tinha características materiais passíveis de classificação padronizada. A análise destes projetos no Algarve e na Andaluzia revela claramente como as comunidades de peritos nacionais e internacionais geraram conhecimento e novas infraestruturas sobre o território dunar. As plantações de dunas constituíram uma conquista inovadora devido ao seu potencial para unificar as práticas de administração e assegurar para os estados o controlo dos territórios e recursos destas regiões periféricas. The Spanish and Portuguese forestry administrations cooperated in the late 19th century to carry out a series of pioneering reforestation projects in various dunes areas. Dunes forestry held a privileged place in administration thought and had material characteristics that lent themselves to standardized classification. The analysis of these projects in the Algarve and Andalucia showed very clearly how national and international communities of experts generated knowledge and new infrastructures about the dunes territory. Producing credible environmental knowledge at that time required an international network of disciplined experts. The dunes plantations constituted a groundbreaking accomplishment because of their potential to unify administration practices.

The present study seeks to better understand the coupling of social and biophysical systems during the late Pleistocene and Holocene, a period characterized by changing interglacial conditions as well as human population expansion and intensified ecosystem management. The approach consists of a combination of patch-based archaeological survey methods, sediment column sampling for paleoenvironmental data, geospatial analysis, and machine learning for chronological unmixing, allowing the systematic evaluation of the distribution and intensity of prehistoric land use in the study area of eastern Mediterranean Iberia. Occupational and Land Use Intensity maps developed from continuous distributions of surface artifacts as well as a summed probability density curve developed from 14C dates indicate low but steady human presence in the study area during the Middle Paleolithic and Upper Paleolithic with a marked decrease of human presence across the Pleistocene/Holocene boundary. The Early (and Middle) Neolithic saw the most ubiquitous and intensive occupation of the study area followed by a significant decline during the Late Neolithic/Chalcolithic. The charcoal analysis also supports this pattern. Early Neolithic farming strategies may not have been damaging initially during the climatic regime of the Early Holocene but exacerbated the impacts of higher temperatures and summer droughts, with a loss of the most productive farmland, seen at the onset of the Late Neolithic. Similar boom-bust population trends have been documented throughout Europe during these same time spans and may indicate a recursive interaction or “coupling” between global and regional climate events and human land use strategies.

Achieving climate neutrality by 2050 requires ground-breaking technological and methodological advancements in climate change mitigation planning and actions from local to regional scales. Monitoring the cities' CO2 emissions with sufficient detail and accuracy is crucial for guiding sustainable urban transformation. Current methodologies for CO2 emission inventories rely on bottom-up (BU) approaches which do not usually offer information on the spatial or temporal variability of the emissions and present substantial uncertainties. This study develops a novel approach which assimilates direct CO2 flux observations from urban eddy covariance (EC) towers with very high spatiotemporal resolution information from an advanced urban BU surface flux model (Part 1 of this study, Stagakis et al., 2023) within a Bayesian inversion framework. The methodology is applied to the city centre of Basel, Switzerland (3 × 3 km domain), taking advantage of two long-term urban EC sites located 1.6 km apart. The data assimilation provides optimised gridded CO2 flux information individually for each urban surface flux component (i.e. building heating emissions, commercial/industrial emissions, traffic emissions, human respiration emissions, biogenic net exchange) at 20 m resolution and weekly time-step. The results demonstrate that urban EC observations can be consistently used to improve high-resolution BU surface CO2 flux model estimations, providing realistic seasonal variabilities of each flux component. Traffic emissions are determined with the greatest confidence among the five flux components during the inversions. The optimised annual anthropogenic emissions are 14.7 % lower than the prior estimate, the human respiration emissions have decreased by 12.1 %, while the biogenic components transformed from a weak sink to a weak source. The root-mean-square errors (RMSEs) of the weekly comparisons between EC observations and model outputs are consistently reduced. However, a slight underestimation of the total flux, especially in locations with complex CO2 source/sink mixture, is still evident in the optimised fluxes.