Postdoc in Turbocompressor Driven Heat Pumps

Postdoc in Turbocompressor Driven Heat Pumps

EPFL - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne

Lausanne, Switzerland

Mission

The TurboHeat project, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, addresses the technical challenges associated with advancing heat pump technology through the integration of small-scale gas bearing supported turbocompressors. The goal is to improve energy efficiency by 20-25% over existing heat pumps for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems in domestic and transport applications. This improvement hinges on addressing critical design and control issues at small scales, where dynamic operating conditions and manufacturing imperfections pose significant challenges.

Main duties and responsibilities

• Working and collaborating on the research project in particular, the contributions to this highly interdisciplinary project focus on:
  • The creation of a fast framework for the automated design and constrained optimization of gas-bearing supported turbocompressors focusing on maximizing performance and robustness,
  • The design and impact of flexibly supported bushings on the rotordynamic behavior of gasbearing supported rotors to enhance the rotordynamic performance, and resilience to external shocks, vibrations & manufacturing deviations, and
  • The dynamic modeling of turbocompressor driven heat pumps.
• We will design, optimize, and manufacture gas bearing supported turbocompressors and test them in a heat pump loop to assess the computational tools developed in this project to improve the energy efficiency of heat pumps.
• Analysis and publication of results
• Build a strong network in the field of research
• Participate in education, and PhD and master student supervision
• Close collaboration with teams from the Scientific Computing and Uncertainty Quantification Lab (CSQI) and the Laboratoire d'Automatique (LA) at EPFL.

Profile

• PhD (or nearing completion of) in Mechanical Engineering
• Background in turbomachinery aerodynamics, heat pumps, modeling approaches for dynamic systems, model order reduction techniques and experimental methods.
• Strong computational and analytical skills
• Publication record (relative to your career stage) in internationally leading journals
• Independent, creative, and solution-oriented
• Excellent written and oral communication skills in English
• Strong motivation to explore new research domains
• Good team spirit

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