Research

Integrated energy systems can offer better energy security, enable decentralized energy systems, and reduce environmental impacts. Renewable energy sources are usually accessible at any location in the world depending on the type, however, harvesting these renewable energy sources and transforming them into useful products is a challenging task because of some major reasons namely, having fluctuating and intermittent characteristics and relatively low resource intensity.

The efficient storage and transport of energy by means of energy carriers is very vital since availability of energy resources are limited to certain regions of the world. There are several methods of energy carriers like electricity, chemical fuels (hydrogen, ammonia etc.), heat, etc. All these energy carriers are crucial for transporting the energy produced in remote and rural locations to urban areas, where the energy demand is higher. Therefore, there is a need to deliver novel, integrated, and cost-effective energy carrier and storage solutions.

Hot arid climates face considerable challenges related to the increased demand and intensive consumption of energy for cooling specifically in residential sector and for securing food production. In hot climates such as Qatar, more than half of the electricity is commonly consumed by the residential sector and air-conditioning is the fundamental part of this consumption. Due to rise of global food demand, controlled greenhouses become essential parts of food production. The increase of greenhouses in several hot regions will obviously impose additional water and cooling requirements. The air conditioning in hot and arid climates remains as one of the grand challenges. Therefore, there is an obvious necessity to design and develop sustainable, smart, novel, efficient and environmentally friendly cooling techniques.