Research Areas

ADVANCED POWER CYCLES

The GECOS group is historically extremely active in Organic Rankine Cycles research. Nowadays this research branch continues to attract much interest along with other advanced cycles technologies such Supercritical CO2 (SCO2) cycles. Improvements to more traditional power generation cycles are also explored in this area.

RENEWABLE ENERGY SOURCES

Our multi-disciplinary team covers research trends on most of renewable energy sources, including solar, wind, biomass. Our traditional field of expertise is Concentrated Solar Plants and Waste-to-Energy for which many collaboration with national and international institutions are active. Innovative cycles such as those for maritime applications are also explored.

CARBON CAPTURE TECHNOLOGIES

Carbon capture technologies are extensively studied by our group which firmly supports the innovation and sustainable development of this sector. The reduction of specific costs of capture and the thrust towards carbon neutral solutions are two main drivers of the technologies that we investigate.

HYDROGEN TECHNOLOGIES

The GECOS group has studied the development of fuel cells from the early '90s both focusing on high and low temperature cells. Nowadays, electrochemical energy systems are gaining increasing commercial interest due to both their low carbon and high efficiency potentialities other than the numerous interconnected applications with renewable energy sources. Energy storage is also explored especially for what concerns hydrogen and power-to-gas applications.

ENERGY SYSTEM MODELLING AND OPTIMISATION

A dedicated team within GECOS is active on developing mathematical optimisation algorithms to support the performance improvements and physical design of thermodynamic cycles and multi-energy systems. The focus is both on technical specification and operational characterisation for market coupling optimisation.

MICRO-GRIDS AND MULTI-ENERGY SYSTEMS

Much effort is given to research on micro-grids with a variety of power generation and storage technologies. Multi-energy systems are also on the spotlight to provide multiple valuable commodities from the same plant facility. Both these concepts are studied for low carbon distributed generation applications in urban and rural areas.