Publications associées à Effect of 30-Degree Sloping Smooth and Stepped Chute Approach Flow on the Performance of a Classical Stilling Basin

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

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

The importance of young professionals for dam engineering in Switzerland

Valentina Favero, Samuel Luke Vorlet

In Switzerland, hydropower is the main energy source and contributes to about 58.3% of the total production. The 2050 energy strategy aims to increase this share in the coming decades. This increase is a challenge for hydropower plants. The maintenance and ...

CRC Press/Balkema2023

Advances in Spillway Hydraulics: From Theory to Practice

Anton Schleiss, José Pedro Gamito de Saldanha Calado Matos

Over the past decades, significant advances have been achieved in hydraulic structures for dams, namely in water release structures such as spillway weirs, chutes, and energy dissipators. This editorial presents a brief overview of the eleven papers in thi ...

2023

Swiss dams: Overview of historical development

Anton Schleiss

With more than 220 large dams in operation, compared to its surface of some 41ʹ000 km2, Switzerland has a very large fleet. They were erected to meet various economic and protection needs. Their main assignments concern the storage of water for later use, ...

CRC Press/Balkema2023

Leveraging industrial biorefineries for the energy transition

François Maréchal, Julia Granacher

Biorefineries hold the potential to provide products and energy carriers at reduced environmental impact compared to their fossil-based counterparts. Thus, they can contribute to the decarbonization of sectors in which electrification of demands is challen ...

Elsevier Sci Ltd2023

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

Experimental investigations on plunge pool protection measures for Ilarion Dam in Greece

Giovanni De Cesare, Anton Schleiss, Azin Amini, Romain Nathan Hippolyte Merlin Van Mol

Ilarion Dam is a 130 m high earthfill dam at Aliakmon River in northern Greece. The dam was commissioned in 2010. It has two spillway tunnels with ski jumps at the outlets. The two spillways are designed to release a total discharge of 5'500 m3/s during th ...

2022

On the scale dependence in the dynamics of frictional rupture: Constant fracture energy versus size-dependent breakdown work

Fabian Barras, Marie Estelle Solange Violay, François Xavier Thibault Passelègue, Federica Paglialunga, Mathias Alexandre David Lebihain

Potential energy stored during the inter-seismic period by tectonic loading around faults is released during earthquakes as radiated energy, frictional dissipation and fracture energy. The latter is of first importance since it is expected to control the n ...

2022

Reservoir Level Rise under Extreme Driftwood Blockage at Ogee Crest

Giovanni De Cesare, Michael Pfister, Loïc Bénet

Dams are civil structures essential to modern civilization. However, they can be a threat if not properly designed and operated. A particular risk that potentially can lead to dam failure is the blocking of the spillway inlet with driftwood or debris. This ...

2021

Heightening of Very High Gravity Dams: The Case Study of the Grande Dixence

Giovanni De Cesare, Pedro Filipe De Almeida Manso, Basile Clerc

Heightening very high gravity dams is one of the solutions considered as part of the energy transition and to mitigate the effects of climate change. The paper presents a stepwise approach to assess the potential for dam heightening and its impact on the h ...

Springer, Cham2020

Assessing the energy potential of modernizing the European hydropower fleet

Anton Schleiss, Elena Vagnoni

About 50% of all hydropower plants (HPPs) worldwide were originally commissioned more than 40 years ago, so that the advanced age of the fleet is a major concern across all continents, and especially in Europe. The modernization of HPPs can generate severa ...

Elsevier2021

Stilling Basin Performance Downstream of Stepped Spillways

Ivan Stojnic

Advances in dam construction techniques have significantly increased the number of implemented stepped spillways worldwide. A key hydraulic feature of a stepped chute, compared to a smooth chute, is the enhanced energy dissipation resulting in a reduced re ...

EPFL2020

RRAM-VAC: A Variability-Aware Controller for RRAM-based Memory Architectures

David Atienza Alonso, Alexandre Sébastien Julien Levisse, Marco Antonio Rios, Shikhar Tuli

The growing need for connected, smart and energy efficient devices requires them to provide both ultra-low standby power and relatively high computing capabilities when awoken. In this context, emerging resistive memory technologies (RRAM) appear as a prom ...

2020

Integrating the Finite Element Method with a Data-Driven Approach for Dam Displacement Prediction

Zhenzhu Meng, Chenfei Shao, Yating Hu

Both numerical simulations and data-driven methods have been applied in dam's displacement modeling. For monitored displacement data-driven methods, the physical mechanism and structural correlations were rarely discussed. In order to take the spatial and ...

2020

Quantum phase transitions and the role of impurity-substrate hybridization in Yu-Shiba-Rusinov states

Klaus Kern, Haonan Huang, Jacob Senkpiel

Spin-dependent scattering from magnetic impurities inside a superconductor gives rise to Yu-Shiba-Rusinov (YSR) states within the superconducting gap. They can be modeled by the largely equivalent Kondo or Anderson impurity models. The role of the magnetic ...

NATURE RESEARCH2020

Hydraulic Reconstruction of the 1818 Gietro Glacial Lake Outburst Flood

Eric Bardou, Christophe Ancey, Martin Funk, Tomás Alfredo Trewhela Palacios

In the spring of 1818, ice avalanches from the Gietro Glacier created an ice dam, which in turn formed a glacial lake in the Drance Valley (Canton of Valais, Switzerland). Today, its maximum volume is estimated to have been 25x10(6) m(3). Cantonal authorit ...

2019

Hydraulic Jump Downstream of a Stepped Chute: An Experimental Study

Anton Schleiss, José Pedro Gamito de Saldanha Calado Matos, Michael Pfister, Ivan Stojnic

The number of stepped spillways significantly increased in the past decades. Among other reasons, this is due to their energy dissipation potential leading to a reduction of the residual energy at the toe of the spillway. To date, only fragmentary designed ...

2019

A Data-Driven Approach Based on Multivariate Copulas for Quantitative Risk Assessment of Concrete Dam

Zhenzhu Meng, Chenfei Shao, Yating Hu

Risk assessment of dam's running status is an important part of dam management. A data-driven method based on monitored displacement data has been applied in risk assessment, owing to its easy operation and real-time analysis. However, previous data-driven ...

2019

Machine Learning and Geographic Information Systems for large-scale mapping of renewable energy potential

Dan Assouline

A promising pathway to follow in order to reach sustainable development goals is an increased reliance on renewable sources of energy. The optimized use of these energy sources, however, requires the assessment of their potential supply, along with the dem ...

EPFL2019

Hire fast, fire slow: the employment benefits of energy transitions

François Richard Vuille, Marc Vielle, Yann Füllemann, Vincent Moreau

The transition towards decarbonized and efficient energy systems has broad socio-economic implications. We estimate the potential impacts on employment from efforts in energy efficiency in industry, transport and buildings as well as substituting local ren ...

2020