Publications related to Key Energy and Technological Aspects of Three Innovative Concepts of District Energy Networks

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

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

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

Renewable energy integration and waste heat valorization in aluminum remelting for co-producing kerosene and methanol

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

The aluminium sector relies on natural gas for the conversion of recycled scrap into new feedstock, which results in substantial atmospheric emissions. Hydric resources are also impacted, as they serve as heat sinks for the waste heat generated during the ...

Associazione Italiana Di Ingegneria Chimica2024

Absolute energy levels of liquid water from many-body perturbation theory with effective vertex corrections

Alfredo Pasquarello, Thomas Bischoff, Aleksei Tal

We demonstrate the importance of addressing the F vertex and thus going beyond the GW approximation for achieving the energy levels of liquid water in manybody perturbation theory. In particular, we consider an effective vertex function in both the polariz ...

National Academy of Sciences2024

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

Self-catalysed frontal polymerisation enables fast and low-energy processing of fibre reinforced polymer composites

Véronique Michaud, Baris Çaglar, Jacobus Gerardus Rudolph Staal

Frontal polymerisation has the potential to bring unprecedented reductions in energy demand and process time to produce fibre reinforced polymer composites. Production of epoxy-based fibre reinforced polymer parts with high fibre volume content, commonly e ...

2024

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

Solar-assisted clean steam generator, a cleaner production approach for sustainable healthcare facilities

Fernando Porté Agel, Ahmad Arabkoohsar, Mohammad Jamshidmofid

Healthcare sector buildings, particularly hospitals, significantly contribute to global energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Hospitals require a substantial amount of steam, including the essential hygienic or " clean steam, " that is currently ...

Elsevier Sci Ltd2024

Advanced control strategies to exploit the hydropower potential enhancing ancillary services provision to the power system

Francesco Gerini

The European Union's Green Deal aims for a 55% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. To reach this goal, a massive integration of Renewable Energy Sources (RES) into the power grid is necessary. As RES become a large part of the electricity genera ...

EPFL2024

Green hydrogen production using Shewanella oneidensis MR-1 bioanode and cuprous oxide-based photocathode

Michele Morgante

In recent years, many efforts have been made to find alternative renewable energy sources that can ideally replace the use of fossil fuels in all aspects. One of the new emerging energy technologies is the bioelectrochemical system, of which two types are ...

EPFL2024

Computational fluid dynamics simulations of the heat transfer properties of graphene-based nanolubricants and application to hydrodynamic lubrication

Roberto Guarino

In this paper, we consider experimental data available for graphene-based nanolubricants to evaluate their convective heat transfer performance by means of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. Single-phase models with temperature-dependent prope ...

Aip Publishing2024

Fusing Pre-existing Knowledge and Machine Learning for Enhanced Building Thermal Modeling and Control

Loris Di Natale

Buildings play a pivotal role in the ongoing worldwide energy transition, accounting for 30% of the global energy consumption. With traditional engineering solutions reaching their limits to tackle such large-scale problems, data-driven methods and Machine ...

EPFL2024

Thermal conductivity of Li 3 PS 4 solid electrolytes with ab initio accuracy

Michele Ceriotti, Federico Grasselli

The vast amount of computational studies on electrical conduction in solid-state electrolytes is not mirrored by comparable efforts addressing thermal conduction, which has been scarcely investigated despite its relevance to thermal management and (over)he ...

Amer Physical Soc2024

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

DBFS: Dynamic Bitwidth-Frequency Scaling for Efficient Software-defined SIMD

Giovanni Ansaloni, Alexandre Sébastien Julien Levisse, Flavio Ponzina, Pengbo Yu

Machine learning algorithms such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are characterized by high robustness towards quantization, supporting small-bitwidth fixed-point arithmetic at inference time with little to no degradation in accuracy. In turn, small ...

IEEE2024

Vapor compression and energy dissipation in a collapsing laser-induced bubble

Mohamed Farhat, Danail Obreschkow, Armand Baptiste Sieber, Davide Bernardo Preso

The composition of the gaseous phase of cavitation bubbles and its role on the collapse remains to date poorly understood. In this work, experiments of single cavitation bubbles in aqueous ammonia serve as a novel approach to investigate the effect of the ...

Aip Publishing2024

Beyond the average consumer: Mapping the potential of demand-side management among patterns of appliance usage

Claudia Rebeca Binder Signer, Matteo Barsanti, Selin Yilmaz

To support the decarbonisation of the power sector and offset the volatility of a system with high levels of renewables, there is growing interest in residential Demand-Side Management (DSM) solutions. Traditional DSM strategies require consumers to active ...

2024

Innovative thermophysical characterization of an ATF composite cladding: the case of silicon carbide

Andrea Cavaliere

Nuclear power is a powerful technology that plays an important role in the fight against climate change, and research is continuously engaged in studies that could further improve its safety. After the Fukushima accident, Accident Tolerant Fuels research h ...

EPFL2024

Heuristic Estimation of the Vacuum Energy Density of the Universe: Part II-Analysis Based on Frequency Domain Electromagnetic Radiation

Farhad Rachidi-Haeri, Marcos Rubinstein

In Part I of this paper, an inequality satisfied by the vacuum energy density of the universe was derived using an indirect and heuristic procedure. The derivation is based on a proposed thought experiment, according to which an electron is accelerated to ...

2024