Project Listing

Energy production directly impacts on climate change. Fossil fuels combustion means close to 50% of the Spanish electricity mix. Spain is the European country with most kWh/m2 average yearly irradiance received, with also high wind resources. The promotion of the renewable energies would potentially save important amount of emissions. Developing an algorithm for energy production optimisation could save tons of carbon dioxide emissions, between other highly toxic gasses. Therefore, we aim to build an optimisation algorithm to calculate the best option for the greenest development of the energy sector which would define a new Spanish electricity mix, by proposing the alternative scenario where most of the produced electricity would come from renewable generators

Microalgae cultivation for CO2 capture. Biofuels production from renewable biomass: Biodiesel from microbial biomass (microalgae, cyanobacteria, fungus) through catalytic and biocatalytic processes; biogas by anaerobic digestion of microalgae and cyanobacteria; bio-oil by catalytic and non-catalytic hydrothermal liquefaction of microbial and other renewable biomass. Bioproducts production from microbial biomass.

In the context of the Organic Device Characterization Laboratory-LabCADIO (belonging to the laboratory network of the Regional Government of Madrid, ref-351), led by Prof. Carmen Coya, deals with the development of materials, the manufacture of devices, the optimization of cost-effective processes for Organic Electronics (special attention to patterning and transformation of 2D materials (i.e Graphene) by electro erosion) and simulation of transport processes in organic electronic devices.

The actual practice of justice, domestic and international, causes that this is considered, among other things, partial, «unjust», little credible, slow, expensive, unequal, politicized, and unsatisfactory by great part of the citizens of different countries.

DELFO group is formed by four university professors. The group is centred on the study of organic solar cells (OSC) and perovskite solar cells (PSC) stability. The group has active collaborations with different European organizations, such as Fraunhofer-ISE (Germany), CHOSE (Italy), NPL (U. K.) and DTU (Denmark). Research activities in the group are aimed towards fabrication, characterization and physical and circuital modeling of OSC and PSC. The final goal of the research is to understand the physical mechanisms occurring inside OSC and PSC devices, and identify those responsible of degradation.

Feedstock recycling by thermal and catalytic pyrolysis is the most studied technology to convert plastic wastes but these processes present limited conversion at low pyrolysis temperature. An alternative and attractive solution for thermal heating is magnetic induction that might represent a way to save energy. Our proposal is to use magnetic nanoparticles and electromagnetic fields in order to heat just the local active sites of the catalyst, thereby achieving the degradation reaction with a more rapid and lower energy supply than feasible with normal thermal heating processes.

This proposal is aligned to the current initiatives of the European Commission in the water-energy nexus, developing fundamental understanding and technologies in this field and its implementation in the European market. The main goal of this proposal is the design of new technological innovations to increase the energy efficiency for water disinfection processes to enhance resilience and to ensure safe drinking water, facing emerging challenges in water quality as the presence of diverse microcontaminants including antibiotics (ABs) and antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) in water sources. Antibiotic resistance is one of the most threating health issues nowadays. This project aims to approach this problem by including some advanced final-stage water treatments to further improve the removal of ABs and ARGs from discharged effluents. The use of photochemical water treatment processes based on the direct use of solar energy or indirect use to power up energy efficiency LED devices can be applied to ensure resilience in the provision of safe drinking water.

New generation mobile networks (5G and its alternatives) are expected to become a game changer that will certainly modify the way people participate in society and benefitiate from all sorts of public and private services. However, it also implies an important increase in the density of wireless communications systems. As side effects, the energy consumption and the electromagnetic contamination are going to be dramatically increased. This drives to different situations in urban and rural areas. Both would benefitiate from a significant reduction in the power consumption of wireless systems, and urban areas would also obtain important benefits from a significant reduction in radio emisions. The proposed research aims at proposing a new system architecture for wireless systems in which hardware is powered and activated upon demand depending on the service level, bandwidth and other requirements that must be satisfied

Our main research lines comprise coordination mechanisms and services for the efficient use of shared limited resources. We frequently apply them to environments with autonomous stakeholders where, besides efficiency, different types of fairness and “social welfare” as well as all sorts of “security” constraints need to be considered, so as to enable an effective implementation. For this purpose, we usually combine multiagent techniques from a sandbox that we call “agreement technologies” (semantic technologies, market-based mechanisms, automated negotiation and argumentation, trust and reputation, norms and organisations, …).

Photocatalytic and photoelectrochemical reactions are crucial in various transformations for different applications in Environmental and Energy Science as hydrogen production or CO2 valorization. However, most of the catalysts or photocatalysts used for these reactions are expensive, not sufficiently efficient or need very high quantity of solvents making their use not sustainable from an energetic point of view. this project will be focused on the synthesis, characterization and study of the catalytic and photocatalytic properties of novel systems based on immobilized nanomaterials, which are able to enhance the effectiveness and applicability of these heterogeneous systems for catalytic or photocatalytic green hydrogen production by different methods which may be useful as alternative to the current methods of energy production. In addition, this project will also be focused on the search of novel nanosystems which may store and transform in valuable chemicals different gases such as CO2 or hydrogen under mild conditions.