On 27 August, Prof. Reza Abhari from ETH Zurich visited our institute.Reza Abhari has been a full professor of Energy Technologies at ETH Zurich as well as the 5th Head of the Laboratory for Energy Conversion (LEC) since its establishment in 1892, being one of the oldest research centers in the world focusing on Energy and Turbomachinery research and teaching. His group focuses in research on developing break-through technologies for a broad range of scientific and technological areas with societal impact. Current research involves analytical, computational and experimental research and education related to technology and economics of; energy systems, turbomachinery, gas turbine technology, wind energy, power generation systems, aerospace, advanced diagnostic sensor and actuator technologies, and semiconductor industries. In addition, he has been involved in bringing scientific tools and processes to support national policy in a number of countries related to the fields of energy, environment, economics and urbanization.
In this seminar, Prof. Abhari gave a lecture titled “A Possible Approach to Optimize Energy Infrastructure of a Country using ‘Big Data’”. Firstly, He beriefly introduced some recent highlights of research activities at Laboratory for Energy Conversion and his group. Then the role of a systematic and dynamic ‘bottom up’ analysis tool and framework to analyze and perform policy ‘what if’ scenarios for a region, a country or an entire continent was presented. He emphasized that by fusing through advanced algorithms large amount of data from; GIS maps of the land topology and infrastructure, detailed multi-spectral satellite image processing, real-time (hourly) electricity grid network, and weather predictive tools on a national scale, financial analysis of viability of different technologies could be performed in order to support regional and national policy framework. After the lecture, the researchers from IET actively discussed with Prof. Abhari on problems encountered in their work, such as energy policy, advanced aerodynamic measurements and gas turbine technology.
Prof. Abhari received his BA/MA degree in Engineering Science from Oxford University and his PhD from the Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering Department of MIT in 1991. Following his Ph.D., he held various senior research positions in the aerospace industry. In 1995, he joined the faculty of the Ohio State University with a joint appointment in Aerospace Engineering Department and the Mechanical Engineering Department, before moving to ETH Zurich in 1999. Among many other awards, he received the ASME R. Tom Sawyer Award for long-standing contributions to gas turbine science, technology and industry.
