Legacy of old news

Here comes the sun: Heliostat Optimization

Heliostats are solar power plants that collect sun light by mirrors - sometimes hundreds of them - sending it to a receiver where the energy is converted. The main challenge is how to distribute the mirrors such that a maximum of light is collected. Prof. Manuel Torrilhon from MathCCES collaborated with Prof. Alexander Mitsos and his graduate student Corey Noone (both from MIT) to find a bio-mimetic mirror layout that is inspired from the arrangement of sunflower seeds. The result decreases the area needed for the heliostat and increases the over-all efficiency at the same time. The paper will be published in the journal 'Solar Energy'. Additionally, MIT and RWTH are applying for a patent together with the involved researchers.

The results of this project were featured on the MIT frontpage on January 11, 2012, see also the MIT news. It also made it into several online blogs and technology news, like Wired.com. The January 21 print issue of The Economist contains a short article about it, too.

Alexander Mitsos was a Junior Research Group Leader at the AICES Graduate School of RWTH in 2008.

Long Term Visitor
Arriving August 2015, Prof. Henning Struchtrup from University of Victoria is visiting MathCCES for the two months.

Long Term Visitor
Arriving December 2012, Prof. Clinton Groth from University of Toronto is visiting MathCCES for the winter term of 2012/13.

Long Term Visitor
Arriving mid of March 2011, Prof. Benjamin Seibold from Temple University is visiting MathCCES for the summer term of 2011.

Guest-Lunch-Seminar, Thursday, 16 August 2012

• Speaker: Gregor Gassner, Andrea Beck & Sophie Knechtel, University of Stuttgart
• Title: Turbulence Investigation based on Regularized 13-Moment Equations
• Location and Time: MATHCCES Seminar Room 328 (Rogowski), 11:00

Guest-Lunch-Seminar, Wednesday, 11 July 2012

• Speaker: Prof. Juan Carlos De Los Reyes, EPN Quito
• Title: An optimization based numerical approach for free boundary problems modeled by variational inequalities of the second kind
• Location and Time: MATHCCES Seminar Room 328 (Rogowski), 14:30

Guest-Lunch-Seminar, Thursday, 22 March 2012

• Speaker: Reinhard Illner, Department of Mathematics, University of Victoria, Canada
• Title: On a Functional-Differential Equation arising from a Traffic Flow Model
• Location and Time: MATHCCES seminar room 1090|328, 14:00 - 15:00

Guest-Lunch-Seminar, Tuesday, 23 March 2011

• Speaker: Andreas Kurz, High Voltage Technology, RWTH Aachen
• Title: Physical Modeling of the Switching Process in Self-Blast Circuit Breakers
• Location and Time: MATHCCES seminar room 1090|328, 12:00 - 13:00

Guest-Lunch-Seminar, Thursday, 16 December 2010

• Speaker: Peter Kauf, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
• Title: Hybrid Discretizations of Kinetic Equations
• Location and Time: MATHCCES seminar room 1090|328, 12:00 - 13:00

Guest-Seminar, Thursday, 18 November 2010

• Speaker: Prof. Cory Hauck, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA
• Title: A Collision-Based Hybrid Method for Linear Transport
• Location and Time: MATHCCES seminar room 1090|328, 12:00 - 13:00

Guest-Seminar, Thursday, 4 November 2010

• Speaker: Prof. David Ketcheson, KAUST, Saudi-Arabia
• Title: On the “Shocking” Behavior of Nonlinear Waves in Periodic Materials
• Location and Time: Main Building room 149, 14:00 - 15:00

Seminar, 07 July 2010

• Speaker: Prof. Rodolphe Turpault, Université de Nantes, France
• Title: Asymptotic Preserving Scheme for Systems of Conservation Laws with Stiff Source Terms
• Location and Time: MATHCCES seminar room 1090|328, 16:30 - 17:30

Seminar, 02 June 2010

• Speaker: Prof. Benjamin Seibold, Temple University, USA
• Title: New computational approaches based on the method of characteristics
• Location and Time: MATHCCES seminar room 1090|328, 15:45 - 16:45

Fall 2010:

New Master program Nuclear Safety Engineering

Past Events

• Workshop on Moment Methods in Kinetic Theory in Fall 2008 co-organized by Manuel Torrilhon hosted by the Seminar of Applied Mathematics at ETH Zurich.
• International Conference on Numerical approximations of hyperbolic systems with source terms and applications in Fall 2013 co-orgainzed by Martin Frank.