Registrations

• Registration

KEY NOTE LECTURE

ENGINEERING INTERFACES AND NANOFLUIDS FOR ENERGY APPLICATIONS

Abstract

This talk aims to discuss some multi-scale transport phenomena at solid-liquid interfaces, which are relevant in characterizing and designing materials for energy applications. We can distinguish two broad categories: interfaces where the solid phase prevails on the liquid one and those where the opposite holds. The first category includes engineered interfaces for optimizing the water uptake (adsorption/infiltration) isotherms into solid micro-/nano-porous materials. In this talk, I will investigate water-zeolite adsorption isotherms for thermal storage applications and water-zeolite infiltration isotherms for reverse osmosis applications. Concerning the second category, I will discuss the nanofluids, namely colloidal suspensions of engineered nanoparticles. In this case, the interfacial properties are determined by the nanoparticle surface, engineered by functionalizations, electrolytes and surfactants. The nanoparticle surface determines the properties of the solvent nanolayer effect, which is responsible of the solvation forces and consequently of the colloidal stability. In this talk, I will put some special emphasis on nanofluids for solar thermal engineering.

Biography

Dr. Asinari received his B.S. and M.S. (cum laude) in Mechanical Engineering in 2001 from “Politecnico di Torino”, Italy. After working as industrial consultant, he received his Ph.D. in Energetics in 2005 at the Department of Energetics. He is currently Associate Professor at the Energy Department of “Politecnico di Torino”. His research activity deals with proposing mesoscopic descriptions of phenomena, designing new numerical schemes (mainly in the framework of Lattice Boltzmann Method), developing new numerical codes (including parallel codes on large cluster facilities) and finally applying the previous tools in order to investigate the microscopic fluidics of industrial devices.