A team of Rice students has won the Student-led Paper Award at the 18th annual Energy Sustainability Conference of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).
The paper, “From Waste to Resource: a Techno-economic Evaluation of a CO2 Heat Pump and ORC Combined System with Photovoltaic Integration and Thermal Storage,” was presented as part of the conference proceedings.
“The research was one outcome of the grant we received from FlowServe,” said Laura Schaefer, the Burton J. and Ann M. McMurtry Chair in Engineering and professor of mechanical engineering (MECH).
In 2022, Rice and Flowserve Corp., a manufacturer of equipment for the oil and gas industry based in Irving, Texas, established a partnership to support research into energy transition and flow control. Flowserve agreed to fund five research projects at Rice for a total of almost $500,000.
Much of the research was done in Schaefer’s Energy Systems Laboratory. Last year, an earlier version of the research won the Outstanding Paper Award at ASME’s 17th annual International Conference on Energy Sustainability.
Schaefer’s co-authors are Kashif Liaqat, a third-year doctoral student in MECH; Shima Soleimani, formally a postdoctoral associate at Rice, now thermal dynamics lead engineer at GE Aerospace; Sophie Leibowitz ’24 B.S. in MECH, now rotation engineer at Calpine; Jörg Temming and Heiner Kösters, engineers with FlowServe Corp.
The ASME conference was held July 15-17 in Anaheim, Calif.