PhD/Postdoc Position Alert
2024 Summer Group Outing
Mr. Gautier Rouaze has passed his candidacy exam. Congrats!
2023 Fall End-of-Semester Dinner
Mr. Luca Magoni finished the EPFL E3 Program
First ETA-Lab Group Dinner
Insulated Cooling with Evaporation and Radiation (ICER)
Passive cooling relying on evaporation and radiation, while offering great energy-saving opportunities, faces challenges with low ambient cooling powers, environmental heating, high water usage, and climate condition constraints. To overcome these shortcomings, here, we present insulated cooling with evaporation and radiation (ICER), which utilizes a solar-reflecting layer, an infrared-emitting evaporative layer, and an infrared-transparent, solar-reflecting, (…)
Traditionally Nonwetting Surface Made to Wet Mercury
We present a surface-engineering approach that turns all liquids highly wetting, including ultra-high surface tension fluids such as mercury. Previously, highly wetting behavior was only possible for intrinsically wetting liquid/material combinations. Here, we show that roughness made of reentrant structures allows for a metastable hemiwicking state even for nonwetting liquids as predicted by our surface (…)
Transport-Based Modeling of Nucleation on Electrodes
Bubble nucleation is ubiquitous in gas evolving reactions which are instrumental for a variety of electrochemical systems. Fundamental understanding of the nucleation process, which is critical to system optimization, remains limited as prior works generally focused on the thermodynamics and have not considered the coupling between surface geometries and different forms of transport in the (…)
Passive Subambient Cooling with Evaporation-Insulation Bilayer
Passive thermal management strategies show promise to alleviate the ever-increasing global energy demand for cooling which is projected to triple in 2050. Passive cooling also provides viable pathways to distribution and storage of food and pharmaceuticals in underdeveloped areas, given that >10% of the world’s population still have no access to electricity. Due to the (…)