District Heating and Cooling networks distribute energy from a centralized generation plant to a number of remote customers. As such, actual DHC systems suffer from • significant heat losses • highly unexplored integration potential of different available energy sources (e.g. renewables and waste heat) into the network • high installation costs. FLEXYNETS will develop, demonstrate and deploy a new generation of intelligent district heating and cooling networks that reduce energy transportation losses by working at “neutral” temperature levels. Reversible heat pumps and chillers will be used to exchange heat with the DHC network on the demand side. In this way, the same network can provide contemporary heating and cooling. FLEXYNETS solutions will integrate effectively multiple generation sources (including high- and low-temperature solar thermal, biomass, PV, cogeneration and waste heat) where they are available along the DHC network, by managing energy at different temperature levels and assuring optimized exergy exploitation. Together with storages, control strategies that optimize the harvest of renewable energy sources are key from the technical and economic points of view. On the one hand, strategies will be assessed that assure a thermal balance among diffused heat generation, storage and utilization. On the other, policies will be elaborated to decide when energy is to be gathered locally or exchanged (both purchased and sold) with the electricity and gas networks. The optimal management of such new generation networks will lead to a synergic effect on primary energy savings (hence on the reduction of the CO2 emissions), assuring at the same time investment and operation profitability. As such, FLEXYNETS will contribute to a higher penetration of smart DHC networks on the heating and cooling market, and will contribute to the European recovery plan.

There are not presently available practical methods of characterising vibro-acoustic sources, which excite supporting and surrounding structures into vibration through the supports and other contacts. The context of the proposal concerns the prediction and control of noise due to machine vibrations being transmitted to a receiving structure, subsequently propagating and re-radiating from the structure as noise. By practical, is meant laboratory methods which yield source data in reduced form, which can be transformed into a prediction of the structure-borne power in the installed condition. Whilst generally, airborne sources have been successfully incorporated into prediction models by reference to airborne sound power, it has not yet been possible to incorporate structure-borne sources on a similar basis. There are two main challenges in seeking a structure-borne source characterisation. First, a source characterisation requires consideration of both the vibration activity and the structural dynamics at the contacts with supporting and surrounding structures. Secondly, the vibration transmission process is complicated and a full description requires a large data set and is experimentally and computationally intensive. However, design engineers, test-house managers and consultants require laboratory-based measurement systems which will yield single values of source strength and the conventional view is that these practical requirements conflict with the requirements for a physical and accurate source characterisation. The core of this investigation is to address this conflict by developing and appraising a novel reception plate method of structure-borne sound source characterisation. The machine under test is attached to a high-mobility plate, from which the source activity is obtained indirectly in the form of the velocity of the free source (i.e. as if the machine had been freely suspended). The machine then is attached to a low-mobility plate to indirectly obtain the blocked force (i.e. as if the machine had been attached to an inert structure). From these two quantities, the source mobility is obtained without direct measurement.The fundamental advantage of this method is that the time consuming and complicated process of directly acquiring the source activity and dynamics for each contact, and for each component of excitation, is replaced with an indirect method which only requires measurement of the response velocity of simple attached plates.

The advancement of project management (PM) knowledge and the development of PM capability of people is crucial to the successful delivery of projects. As the overall project-related spending in the EU is assumed to be about € 3.27 trillion there are huge societal and economic challenges of reducing the massive financial and psychological costs of poor project delivery. Especially as about 6% of all projects are believed to be wholly unsuccessful, many of them tax-payer funded. Our programme is designed to put building blocks in place to enable PM to respond to the challenges it faces in delivering projects successfully in the 21st century. It does this by taking a multi-disciplinary perspective encompassing PM, lean management, psycho-social aspects, innovation and change management. The building blocks will have three broad pillars: one focused on PM efficiency (being Lean), one on PM systems that meet the psycho-social needs of project staff (being Seen) and one on making PM responsive to the need of organisations to be innovative and manage change (being Lean and Seen). The programme will cater for different contexts of project delivery in developed and developing countries, to reflect the global and interconnectedness nature of projects. A network of five academic partners, including one from a developing country and five non-academic, will deliver the holistic PM framework to guide project delivery in the future. They will investigate the role of different management practices in PM contexts and the distinctions in PM system design and delivery in different contexts. Data will be collected through a multiple method approach including in-depth reviews of the literatures, secondary data sources, cross-sectional surveys, case studies, focus groups, Delphi and interviews. Innovation will take place by bringing together the knowledge of theoretical perspectives from different disciplines, which largely reside in the academic partners, with the practical knowledge