Publications by authors named "Marco Curto"

Article Synopsis
  • This study investigates how polylactic acid (PLA) and polypropylene (PP) plastics break down into microplastics under UV radiation and seawater conditions, simulating real environmental scenarios.
  • The results show that after 76 days of UV exposure, PP released significantly more microplastics compared to PLA, indicating that PLA has a lower rate of fragmentation.
  • Additionally, the study found that PLA microplastics are generally larger and exhibit different shapes compared to PP microplastics, suggesting that bio-based materials may be more resistant to fragmentation than petroleum-based plastics.
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There is a growing interest in replacing fossil-based polymers and composites with more sustainable and renewable fully biobased composite materials in automotive, aerospace and marine applications. There is an effort to develop components with a reduced carbon footprint and environmental impact, and materials based on biocomposites could provide such solutions. Structural components can be subjected to different marine conditions, therefore assessment of their long-term durability according to their marine applications is necessary, highlighting related degradation mechanisms.

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Combination of micro-focus computed tomography (micro-CT) in conjunction with in situ mechanical testing and digital volume correlation (DVC) can be used to access the internal deformation of materials and structures. DVC has been exploited over the past decade to measure complex deformation fields within biological tissues and bone-biomaterial systems. However, before adopting it in a clinically-relevant context (i.

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Digital Volume Correlation (DVC) has become popular for measuring the strain distribution inside bone structures. A number of methodological questions are still open: the reliability of DVC to investigate augmented bone tissue, the variability of the errors between different specimens of the same type, the distribution of measurement errors inside a bone, and the possible presence of preferential directions. To address these issues, five augmented and five natural porcine vertebrae were subjected to repeated zero-strain micro-CT scan (39μm voxel size).

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