Publications related to Understanding the thermo-mechanical response of heat exchanger piles

Performance of energy piles foundation in hot-dominated climate: A case study in Dubai

Lyesse Laloui, Elena Ravera, Sofie Elaine ten Bosch

Energy piles represent an innovative technology that can help provide sustainable geothermal heating or cooling energy for thermal conditioning purposes. In hot-dominated climates, the interest is to inject heat in the ground and extract energy for space-c ...

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd2024

Decomposition method to evaluate district heating/cooling network potential at urban scale

Luc Girardin, François Maréchal, Raphaël Briguet, Ana Catarina Gouveia Braz, Bingqian Liu

In this work, a tool to design district heating networks (DHN) is presented and applied to the city of Lausanne as a case study. The evaluation of the buildings’ heat/cooling demand is performed using a Geographic Information System (GIS) database, built f ...

Associazione Italiana Di Ingegneria Chimica2024

Shaped Laser Pulses for Microsecond Time-Resolved Cryo-EM: Outrunning Crystallization during Flash Melting

Marcel Drabbels, Ulrich Lorenz, Constantin Richard Krüger, Nathan Junior Mowry

Water vitrifies if cooled at rates above 3 × 105 K/s. In contrast, when the resulting amorphous ice is flash heated, crystallization occurs even at a more than 10 times higher heating rate, as we have recently shown. This may present an issue for microseco ...

2024

Flash Melting Amorphous Ice

Marcel Drabbels, Ulrich Lorenz, Constantin Richard Krüger, Gabriele Bongiovanni, Nathan Junior Mowry

Water can be vitrified if it is cooled at high rates, which makes it possible to outrun crystallization in so-called no man’s land, a range of deeply supercooled temperatures where water crystallizes rapidly. Here, we study the reverse process in pure wate ...

2024

Design and assessment of an evaporating water-cooled methanation reactor for a SOE-based power-to-methane system

Philippe Aubin

The transition towards clean renewable energy sources, where wind and solar are prone to variation, requires adequate energy storage. Power-to-methane (PtM) systems can be part of the solution. Specifically, solid-oxide-electrolyser (SOE) based PtM systems ...

EPFL2024

Investigation of microbial community dynamics in soil during variable hydrological forcing

Simiao Wang

Climate change is expected to alter the temporal distribution of precipitation events, leading to prolonged drought periods and an increased frequency of extreme precipitation events. Changes in precipitation pattern will directly affect soil moisture dyna ...

EPFL2024

Models implemented in the methodological approach to design the initial STEP first wall contour

Kevin Henricus Annemarie Verhaegh, Dario Vaccaro, Filippo Bagnato, Davide Galassi

The official Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production mission aims to demonstrate the ability to generate net electricity from fusion with the STEP Prototype Power plant. One of the key technological and engineering challenges in fusion power plants is mana ...

Elsevier Science Sa2024

Experiments and gyrokinetic simulations of TCV plasmas with negative triangularity in view of DTT operations

Olivier Sauter, Stefano Coda, Alberto Mariani, Justin Richard Ball, Filippo Bagnato, Matteo Vallar

Negative triangularity (NT) scenarios in TCV have been compared to positive triangularity (PT) scenarios using the same plasma shapes foreseen for divertor tokamak test tokamak operations. The experiments provided a NT/PT L-mode pair and a PT H-mode with d ...

Iop Publishing Ltd2024

Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Flow and Hydrochemistry in Drainage Networks

Izabela Bujak-Ozga

Despite their high ecological value, non-perennial streams have received less attention than their perennial counterparts. This doctoral thesis addresses this disparity by advancing knowledge on the dynamics of the drainage density and hydrologic processes ...

EPFL2024

Soil warming alters tree water use and canopy stomatal conductance in a mixed subtropical forest

Charlotte Grossiord, Christoph Bachofen

As air temperature and vapor pressure deficit (VPD) increase continuously, forests are losing more water through evapotranspiration, with large consequences for local and global hydrological cycles. In regions with high vegetation cover, soil warming can b ...

Elsevier2024

Seeking the new, learning from the unexpected: Computational models of surprise and novelty in the brain

Alireza Modirshanechi

Human babies have a natural desire to interact with new toys and objects, through which they learn how the world around them works, e.g., that glass shatters when dropped, but a rubber ball does not. When their predictions are proven incorrect, such as whe ...

EPFL2024

Identification of typical district configurations: A two-step global sensitivity analysis framework

François Maréchal, Jonas Schnidrig, Cédric Terrier

The recent geopolitical conflicts in Europe have underscored the vulnerability of the current energy system to the volatility of energy carrier prices. In the prospect of defining robust energy systems ensuring sustainable energy supply in the future, the ...

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd2024

Transparent structured conductive coating for applications in smart windows

Jérémy Jacques Antonin Fleury

Solar radiation reaching the surface of the earth for a period of one hour contains more energy than that consumed by mankind over an entire year. Some of this solar energy is already collected by photovoltaic cells to cover the electricity needs of buildi ...

EPFL2023

Selection and Optimal Use of Nanoporous Materials for Adsorption Energy Technologies

Emanuele Piccoli

Due to the large waste of heat in the power and industrial sectors, our use of energy is inefficient. Moreover, it relies on rapidly depleting and greenhouse-gas-emitting sources such as fossil fuels. While the scarcity of energy resources is a relevant so ...

EPFL2023

Data-driven 1D wave propagation for site response analysis

Jean-François Molinari, Sacha Zenon Wattel, Antonio Joaquin Garcia Suarez

Prediction of ground motion triggered by earthquakes is a prime concern for both the seismology community and geotechnical earthquake engineering one. The subfield occupied with such a problem is termed site response analysis (SRA), its one-dimensional fla ...

WILEY2023

Renewable Energy Integration and Waste Heat Recovery for the Production of Sustainable Jet Fuel and Decarbonization of Industrial Heating Applications

François Maréchal, Daniel Alexander Florez Orrego, Meire Ellen Gorete Ribeiro Domingos, Réginald Germanier

The process synthesis and optimization methods used in this work include simulation of biomass gasification, hydrogen and synthetic natural gas production, and jet fuel production via a Fisher Tropsch unit. An energy integration approach, carried out by th ...

American Institute of Chemical Engineering2023

Heat pumping and renewable energy integration for decarbonizing brewery industry and district heating

François Maréchal, Daniel Alexander Florez Orrego, Meire Ellen Gorete Ribeiro Domingos

The energy integration of brewery plants and urban agglomerations has many benefits in terms of rational energy use and reduced environmental impact, especially during scenarios of uncertain supply chain and volatile market prices. In fact, the diversifica ...

Elsevier2023

Thermo-hydro-mechanical behavior of energy barrettes: Field experiments and numerical simulations

Lyesse Laloui, Alessandro Francesco Rotta Loria, Elena Ravera

Over the past two decades, the thermo-hydro-mechanical behavior of earth-contact structures such as piles, walls, slabs, and tunnels, which simultaneously provide structural support and energy supply, has been studied through various field experiments and ...

ELSEVIER2023

DeepValve: Development and experimental testing of a Reinforcement Learning control framework for occupant-centric heating in offices

Dolaana Khovalyg, Amirreza Heidari

Space heating controls in offices usually follow static schedules detached from actual occupancy, which results in energy waste by unnecessarily heating vacant offices. The uniqueness of stochastic occupancy profile and thermal response time of each office ...

2023

Impact of Standard versus Tracked-based User Behavior into Energy Simulations of Open-Space Offices

Dolaana Khovalyg, Arnab Chatterjee, Verena Marie Barthelmes

This simulation-based study aimed to contribute to gaining knowledge on how much the deviation between occupant-related input by the national standard and by insitu measurements might impact predictions of heating/cooling needs in offices. Analysis was per ...

2023