HighEFF collaboration – KIFEE Professor Yamaguchi from Doshisha University visits Trondheim

Professor Hiroshi Yamaguchi from Doshisha University, one of the KIFEE professors, visited NTNU and SINTEF for a two week period starting from the end of August 2017, hosted by Adjunct Professor Petter Nekså, Professor Trygve M. Eikevik and Professor Armin Hafner. The visit was financed by the KIFEE Intpart program.

Central topics for discussions were university collaboration between NTNU and Doshisha and project collaboration through the new FME (Centre for environmentally-friendly energy research) HighEFF, where University of Doshisha is one of the research partners.

HighEFF is focusing on energy efficiency in the industry, an area where Professor Yamaguchi has much relevant research activity.

One of Yamaguchi’s expert fields, and where work is performed as a part of the HighEFF Centre, is cooling and cold storage concepts at ultra low temperatures (-70⁰C) based on CO₂ dry-ice sublimation and storage. Professor Yamaguchi’s and the coauthor’s work related to this has been published as a conference paper at “The World Engineers Summit – Applied Energy Sumposium, Fourm: Low Carbon Cities and Urban Energy Joint Conference (receiving the best paper award), and a journal article has been submitted for review in the Elsevier journal Energy Procedure. These papers are coauthored by Professor Nekså.

Professor Yamaguchi also gave lectures related to magnetic fluids and the many exciting possible applications of such fluids. Within the energy sector a potential utilization of ferro-fluids as an advanced heat transfer fluid gains interest. The magnetic characteristics varying by temperature enables development of a pumping effect without mechanical moving parts. Research in this area is also performed at SINTEF and NTNU. Further collaboration in the area was discussed.

Last, but not least, overall level meetings related to KIFEE was arranged, with planning of the next KIFEE-9 in Norway as the main topic.