Extra-virgin olive oils (EVOO), high in phenolic compounds with antioxidant properties, could be partly responsible for the lower mortality and incidence of cancer and CVD in the Mediterranean region. The present study aims to measure oxidative DNA damage in healthy human subjects consuming olive oils with different concentrations of natural phenols. A randomised cross-over trial of high-phenol EVOO (high-EVOO; 592 mg total phenols/kg) v. low-phenol EVOO (low-EVOO; 147 mg/kg) was conducted in ten postmenopausal women in Florence. Subjects were asked to substitute all types of fat and oils habitually consumed with the study oil (50 g/d) for 8 weeks in each period. Oxidative DNA damage was measured by the comet assay in peripheral blood lymphocytes, collected at each visit during the study period. Urine samples over 24 h were collected to measure the excretion of the olive oil phenols. The average of the four measurements of oxidative DNA damage during treatment with high-EVOO was 30 % lower than the average during the low-EVOO treatment (P¼ 0·02). Urinary excretion of hydroxytyrosol and its metabolite homovanillyl alcohol were significantly increased in subjects consuming high-EVOO. Despite the small sample size, the present study showed a reduction of DNA damage by consumption of an EVOO rich in phenols, particularly hydroxytyrosol.

The study of turbulent heat transfer in liquid metal flows has gained interest because of applications in several industrial fields. The common assumption of similarity between the dynamical and thermal turbulence, namely, the Reynolds analogy, has been proven to be invalid for these fluids. Many methods have been proposed in order to overcome the difficulties encountered in a proper definition of the turbulent heat flux, such as global or local correlations for the turbulent Prandtl number and four parameter turbulence models. In this work we assess a four parameter logarithmic turbulence model for liquid metals based on the Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RAN) approach. Several simulation results considering fluids with P r = 0.01 and P r = 0.025 are reported in order to show the validity of this approach. The Kays turbulence model is also assessed and compared with integral heat transfer correlations for a wide range of Peclet numbers.

Nowadays, many open-source numerical codes are available to solve physical problems in structural mechanics, fluid flow, heat transfer, and neutron diffusion. However, even if these codes are often highly specialized in the numerical simulation of a particular type of physics, none of them allows simulating complex systems involving all the physical problems mentioned above. In this work we present a numerical framework, based on the SALOME platform, developed to perform multiscale and multiphysics simulations involving all the mentioned physical problems. In particular, the developed numerical platform includes the multigrid finite element in-house code FEMuS for heat transfer, fluid flow, turbulence and fluid-structure modeling; the open-source finite volume CFD software OpenFOAM; the multiscale neutronic code DONJON-DRAGON; and a system-scale code used for thermal-hydraulic simulations. Efficient data exchange among these codes is performed within computer memory by using the MED libraries, provided by the SALOME platform.

This paper deals with boundary optimal control problems for the Navier-Stokes equations and Wilcox turbulence model. In this paper we study adjoint optimal control problems for Navier-Stokes equations to improve the advantages of using simulations where turbulence models play a significant role in designing engineering devices. We assess first distributed optimal control problems with the purpose to control the fluid behavior by injecting a flow on the boundary solid region to obtain a desired control over the fluid velocity and the kinetic turbulence energy in specific parts of the domain. Then, with the same purpose, we use lifting functions and boundary control. For this reason we reformulate the boundary optimal control problem into a distributed problem through a lifting function approach. The stronger regularity requirements which are imposed by standard boundary control approaches can then be avoided. The state, adjoint and control equations are derived and the optimality system solved for some simple cases with a finite element. Furthermore, we propose numerical strategies that allow to solve the coupled optimality system in a robust way for a large number of unknowns. The approach presented in this work is general and can be used to assess different objectives and types of control.

The main purpose of engineering applications for fluid with natural and mixed convection is to control or enhance the flow motion and the heat transfer. In this paper, we use mathematical tools based on optimal control theory to show the possibility of systematically controlling natural and mixed convection flows. We consider different control mechanisms such as distributed, Dirichlet, and Neumann boundary controls. We introduce mathematical tools such as functional spaces and their norms together with bilinear and trilinear forms that are used to express the weak formulation of the partial differential equations. For each of the three different control mechanisms, we aim to study the optimal control problem from a mathematical and numerical point of view. To do so, we present the weak form of the boundary value problem in order to assure the existence of solutions. We state the optimization problem using the method of Lagrange multipliers. In this paper, we show and compare the numerical results obtained by considering these different control mechanisms with different objectives.