🚀 go-pugleaf

From Monday 2 to Friday 6 December 1996, RMIT is celebrating its 
R&D excellence with a program of events and lectures entitled:

Innovation @ work (http://www.rmit.edu.au/innovation.10.html)

Professor Aliakbar Akbarzadeh will present an inaugural lecture 
entitled: 
'Innovation in energy conservation and industrial waste heat recovery 
systems'.

Speaker:  Professor Aliakbar Akbarzadeh 
Date:  Wednesday 4 December 1996
Time:  11.30 - 12.30
Location:  RMIT City campus, building 8, level 11, room 68

Abstract:

Heat pipes are devices which provide effective heat transfer and are 
sometimes refereed to as superconductors of heat.  Heat pipes in 
their current form were invented in the early 1950's and first used in 
space applications such as cooling of satellites.  Application of this 
technology has more recently spread to many other useful fields.

Using heat pipe technology, highly effective heat exchangers have 
been developed at RMIT for heat recovery applications in industry.  
Heat pipes which offer a very high heat conductance form the 
building block of these heat exchangers.  Through extensive 
experiments in laboratory rigs, the performance of the heat pipe 
exchangers has ben characterised and the effects of different 
parameters such as geometry and working fluid properties studied.  
The results of these experiments have since been used to refine and 
validate computer models simulating the operation of heat pipe based 
heat exchangers.

The application of heat pipe heat exchangers has been demonstrated 
for heat recovery in a major bakery in Victoria.  It has been shown 
that heat pipe exchangers are capable of effectively recovering heat 
from industrial waste heat.  This heat is being used for other 
industrial applications which require lower temperature heat.  Funded 
by Federal government and supported by two local industries a major 
R&D project has recently commenced to develop a manufacturing 
base for industrial heat pipe heat exchangers in Australia.  The 
expectation that more than 25% of waste heat in Australian industries 
can be recovered, indicates that the product of this R&D project may 
play a major role in efficient utilisation of energy in Australian 
industry.

Heat pipe turbines have been recently investigated by the Energy 
Conservation and Renewable Energy Group at RMIT and are 
capable of producing electric power utilisation low grade heat.  These 
machines are heat pipes in which a turbine coupled to an electric 
generator has been integrated.  The turbine utilises the kinetic energy 
associated with the flow of the vapour in the heat pipe and converts it 
into rotational power which in turn is converted into electricity.  
Immediate applications of the heat pipe turbine can be production of 
electric power utilising solar thermal energy, waste heat and 
geothermal energy.

Professor Aliakbar Akbarzadeh 

Professor Aliakbar Akbarzadeh is the leader of the Energy 
Conservation and Renewable Energy Group, Department of 
Mechanical Engineering, RMIT.  He has more than 25 years of 
teaching, research and project supervision in four major universities 
in Australia and overseas in the area of renewable energy and energy 
conservation.

He is the regional editor of the Journal of Applied Thermal 
Engineering (Elsevier Applied Science, UK) and the subject editor 
for the Energy Conservation and Renewable Energy Volume, 
Encyclopedia of Life Support System.

He was the winner of the 1996 Australia National Energy Award.  
His was the best ASME paper in 1993-94 in the area of solar energy.  
The title of the paper is 'The design, construction and operation of a 
Closed Cycle Salt Gradient Solar Pond'.  It was chosen from more 
than one thousand publications in the area of solar energy 
applications.

He has written one text book on renewable energy, 'Fundamentals of 
remote area power supply systems', (DOUC Print, 1992) and 75 
refereed journal articles and refereed conference proceedings (mainly 
on renewable energy and energy conservation).  In addition, he has 
produced more than 20 government/utility/industry reports covering 
applications of solar energy and energy conservation.