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

Quantifying the Unknown: Data-Driven Approaches and Applications in Energy Systems

In light of the challenges posed by climate change and the goals of the Paris Agreement, electricity generation is shifting to a more renewable and decentralized pattern, while the operation of systems like buildings is increasingly electrified. This calls ...

EPFL2024

Study of flexible operating conditions in variable-speed hydraulic turbines : advanced models and experimental validation

Martin Seydoux

The global imperative to transition from fossil fuel-based energy sources to renewable alternatives has become increasingly urgent in the pursuit of sustainable and renewable power generation. This paradigm shift necessitates innovative approaches to manag ...

EPFL2024

A comprehensive review on geomembrane systems application in hydropower

Giovanni De Cesare, Samuel Luke Vorlet

Geomembrane systems have been used at hydropower plants as rehabilitation and mitigation technology for several decades and are now used worldwide. In the context of planning an energy transition that promotes the sustainable use of water resources for ene ...

2024

Scalable constrained optimization

Maria-Luiza Vladarean

Modern optimization is tasked with handling applications of increasingly large scale, chiefly due to the massive amounts of widely available data and the ever-growing reach of Machine Learning. Consequently, this area of research is under steady pressure t ...

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

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

The thermodynamic and life-cycle assessments of a novel charging station for electric vehicles in dynamic and steady-state conditions

Jan Van Herle, Hossein Pourrahmani, Chengzhang Xu

The current study performs the thermodynamic and life-cycle assessments (LCA) of a novel charging station in two system designs. The goal is to design an efficient charging station for electric vehicles with high efficiencies and low environmental impacts ...

Nature Portfolio2023

Dynamic behavior of exposed geomembrane systems in pressure waterways

Giovanni De Cesare, Samuel Luke Vorlet, Roberto Proença Seixas

Geomembrane systems have been used in dams and reservoirs as rehabilitation technology since several decades and are now used worldwide. They act as impervious layer to prevent and mitigate water leakage and damage to structures. They meet the needs of man ...

CRC Press/Balkema2023

Primal-Dual Contextual Bayesian Optimization for Control System Online Optimization with Time-Average Constraints

Colin Neil Jones, Yuning Jiang, Wenjie Xu, Bratislav Svetozarevic

This paper studies the problem of online performance optimization of constrained closed-loop control systems, where both the objective and the constraints are unknown black-box functions affected by exogenous time-varying contextual disturbances. A primal- ...

IEEE2023

Integration of Life Cycle Impact Assessment in Energy System Modelling

Manuele Domenico Margni, François Maréchal, Jonas Schnidrig, Justine Brun

The Paris agreement is the first-ever universally accepted and legally binding agreement on global climate change. It is a bridge between today’s and climate-neutrality policies and strategies before the end of the century. However, government and private ...

2023

Mining Effective Strategies for Climate Change Communication

Matthias Grossglauser, Aswin Suresh, Yurui Zhu, Lazar Milikic

With the goal of understanding effective strategies to communicate about climate change, we build interpretable models to rank tweets related to climate change with respect to the engagement they generate. Our models are based on the Bradley-Terry model of ...

2023

Exploring the efficacy of reservoir fine sediment management measures through numerical simulations

Giovanni De Cesare, Azin Amini, Samuel Luke Vorlet, Montana Marshall

Reservoir sedimentation is one of the main challenges in the sustainable operation of large reservoirs because it causes volume loss, affecting hydropower production capacity, dam safety, and flood management. To ensure the sustainability of deep reservoir ...

CRC Press/Balkema2023

Quality-Constrained Encoding Optimization for Omnidirectional Video Streaming

Pascal Frossard, Roberto Gerson De Albuquerque Azevedo, Chaofan He

Omnidirectional video streaming is usually implemented based on the representations of tiles, where the tiles are obtained by splitting the video frame into several rectangular areas and each tile is converted into multiple representations with different r ...

Ieee-Inst Electrical Electronics Engineers Inc2023

Wind farm power density optimization according to the area size using a novel self-adaptive genetic algorithm

Fernando Porté Agel, Nicolas Otto Kirchner Bossi

This work studies the power density (PD) optimization in wind farms, and its sensitivity to the available area size. A novel genetic algorithm (PDGA) is introduced, which optimizes PD and the turbine layout, by self-adapting to the PD and to the solutions ...

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd2023

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

A note on universal inference

Anthony Christopher Davison, Timmy Rong Tian Tse

Universal inference enables the construction of confidence intervals and tests without regularity conditions by splitting the data into two parts and appealing to Markov's inequality. Previous investigations have shown that the cost of this generality is a ...

WILEY2022

The Land-Water-Energy Nexus of Ruzizi River Dams (Lake Kivu Outflow, African Great Lakes Region): Status, Challenges, and Perspectives

Alfred Johny Wüest

Hydroelectric power (HP) represents the main source of electricity in Africa, including the Democratic Republic of Congo. The demand for new dam construction is high, and major projects are currently progressing through planning and implementation stages. ...

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2022

CFD simulations of hydraulic short-circuits in junctions, application to the Grand’Maison power plant

François Avellan, Cécile Münch-Alligné

In the framework of the XFLEX HYDRO H2020 European Project, the pumped-storage power plant of Grand'Maison (France), owned by Electricité De France, focuses on the implementation of the hydraulic short-circuit (HSC) operating mode. This mode increases the ...

2022

The complex winds of the Alps: an unseen asset for the energy transition

Jérôme François Sylvain Dujardin

Wind energy has played a major role in the development of our society since 5000 BC when the first sail boats traveled the Nile River. Wind technology continued to advance with the invention of wind-powered pumps and mills in China and the Middle East as e ...

EPFL2021