Publications related to Food vs. fuel

Geospatial Tools and Remote Sensing Strategies for Timely Humanitarian Response: A Case Study on Drought Monitoring in Eswatini

This article explores the escalating impact of natural disasters, particularly droughts, in the Southern African Development Community (SADC), with a specific focus on Eswatini. Over the last century, approximately 63 million people in SADC countries have ...

MDPI2024

Decision support for the design of integrated biorefineries

Julia Granacher

A shift from fossil-based energy and products to more sustainable alternatives is essential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and associated climate change impacts. Biomass represents a promising alternative for providing fuels and carbon-based products w ...

EPFL2023

A Sprayable Electrically Conductive Edible Coating for Piezoresistive Strain Sensing

Dario Floreano, Bokeon Kwak, Pietro Rossi

Edible electronics leverages the electronic properties of food-derived materials to deliver safer technologies that can be degraded (or digested) in the environment (or body) at the end-of-life. Sensors will be central to future smart edible robots, and ed ...

2024

Quantitative Design of a New e-Methanol Production Process

Alfred Rufer

In the context of the need to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from personal transportation, a new process for the production of e-methanol is presented. It is a CO2 hydrogenation process, powered mainly by renewable energy sources such as pho ...

MDPI2022

Compressed natural gas (cng) power system with co2 emissions capture and storage

François Maréchal, Shivom Sharma

CNG power system (1) comprising a storage tank (6) connected fluidically to a fuel conversion system (2) via an energy transfer system (4), the fuel conversion system (2) comprising a power unit using CNG as fuel and generating gas emissions comprising C02 ...

2022

The Effects of Time-Restricted Eating versus Standard Dietary Advice on Weight, Metabolic Health and the Consumption of Processed Food: A Pragmatic Randomised Controlled Trial in Community-Based Adults

Felix Naef, Nicholas Edward Phillips

Weight loss is key to controlling the increasing prevalence of metabolic syndrome (MS) and its components, i.e., central obesity, hypertension, prediabetes and dyslipidaemia. The goals of our study were two-fold. First, we characterised the relationships b ...

2021

A two-step decision model on energy retrofitting buildings

Philippe Thalmann, Marc Vielle, Sergey Arzoyan

In standard modelling of energy and climate policies, the speed and extent of energy efficiency improvements (EEIs) are usually assumed to be unaffected, even by policies designed to foster innovation. We model endogenous EEI in a model of the Swiss housin ...

2021

Experimental characterization of a solid oxide fuel cell coupled to a steam-driven micro anode off-gas recirculation fan

Jan Van Herle, Jürg Alexander Schiffmann, Stefan Diethelm, Zacharie Wuillemin, Patrick Hubert Wagner, David Constantin

While the global fuel utilization of solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) is limited by the stack aging rate, the fuel excess is typically used in a burner, and thus limiting the system electrical efficiency. Further, natural-gas-fueled SOFCs require treated wat ...

2020

Microstructured Fibers for the Production of Food

Véronique Michaud, Francesco Stellacci, Fabien Sorin, Yunpeng Qu, Federica Sordo, Emma-Rose Janecek

Food engineering faces the difficult challenge of combining taste, i.e., tailoring texture and rheology of food matrices with the balanced intake of healthy nutrients. In materials science, fiber suspensions and composites have been developed as a versatil ...

Wiley2019

Integrated Design, Optimization, and Experimental Realization of a Steam-Driven Micro Recirculation Fan for Solid Oxide Fuel Cell Systems

Patrick Hubert Wagner

This thesis presents the results of the design and experimental investigation of a patented 10 kWel solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) system with a thermally-driven anode off-gas recirculation (AOR) fan, the so-called fan-turbine unit (FTU). The system has the ...

EPFL2019

Enzymes for second generation biofuels: recent developments and future perspectives

Edgard Gnansounou, Binod Parameswaran

Even though the search for alternative fuels from lignocellulosic biomass started a few decades ago, still it is relatively immature mainly because of few challenges which are yet to be solved for making the process commercially viable. The main challenge ...

2019

Assessing the sustainability of biofuel production from camelina in Spain, results of the ITAKA project - analysis of GHG emissions

Massimiliano Capezzali, Mélanie Guittet

Purpose With the rapid growth and increased consumption of biofuels worldwide, and the multitude of policy decisions supporting this expansion, growing concerns about the biofuels sustainability have arisen. Therefore, the European project ITAKA, aiming at ...

2018

Application of Machine Learning and Mathematical Programming in the Optimization of the Energy Management System for Hybrid-Electric Vessels Having Cyclic Operations

Francesco Baldi, Navid Mohammadzadeh

Shipping contributes today to 2.1% of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and its share is expected to grow in the coming years. At the same time, fuel prices are increasing and companies of the related increase in operational costs. This demands ...

2018

Multi-objective optimization of rainfed and irrigated agricultural areas considering production and environmental criteria: a case study of wheat production in Spain

Pavel Vaskan, Gonzalo Guillen Gosalbez

Meeting the growing food demand with minimum impact on the environment is a major challenge to face for ensuring a more sustainable food production. To tackle this problem, in this article we present a novel systematic method for agriculture planning that ...

Elsevier2017

Frequency-domain technique to measure the inertial response of forward stimulated Brillouin scattering for acoustic impedance sensing

Luc Thévenaz, Marcelo Alfonso Soto Hernandez, Desmond Chow Ming Chia

A frequency-domain method is proposed to measure the inertial response of forward stimulated Brillouin scattering, so that the acoustic impedance of a liquid medium outside an uncoated 30 m standard single-mode fibre can be sensed. The proposed technique o ...

SPIE2017

Thermo-economic analysis of transcritical CO2 cycles with bounded and unbounded reheats in low-temperature heat recovery applications

Ali Amini

Performance of transcritical CO2 Rankine cycles with and without reheat process is investigated thermo-economically in low-grade waste heat recovery applications. Two reheating scenarios are proposed to evaluate the effect of bounded and unbounded reheats ...

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd2017

Robust optimization for strategic energy planning

Michel Bierlaire, François Maréchal, Stefano Moret

Long-term planning for energy systems is often based on deterministic economic optimization and forecasts of fuel prices.When fuel price evolution is underestimated, the consequence is a low penetration of renewables and more efficient technologies in favo ...

2016

The influence of interunit carbon–carbon linkages during lignin upgrading

Jeremy Luterbacher, Masoud Talebi Amiri, Li Shuai

The cleavage of β-O-4 linkages in lignin can generate monomers with a phenyl propane structure that can easily be upgraded into valuable hydrocarbon biofuels and renewable aromatic chemicals. High-yield lignin monomer production from extracted (or technica ...

2016

Resilience and reactivity of global food security

Andrea Rinaldo, Samir Suweis, Paolo d'Odorico, Amos Maritan

The escalating food demand by a growing and increasingly affluent global population is placing unprecedented pressure on the limited land and water resources of the planet, underpinning concerns over global food security and its sensitivity to shocks arisi ...

National Academy of Sciences2015