Tutorial - Michele Ferrazzini, Sanjiv Sharma

In recent years, the need to solve the climate crisis has emerged as an utmost priority. If we don’t want to handover a significantly degraded biosphere to our children, we have to change fast and stop our reliance of fossil fuels, the primary sources of Green House Gases (GHG). Countries have to secure global Net Zero GHG emissions by mid-century, and keep global warming to maximum 1.5°C degrees to pre-industrial era.

Renewable energy and renewable fuels are the key elements to enable this change, but it is not easy to make them available to everybody and with the required capacity: renewable energy can be produced only when the sources (like Wind, Solar radiation, Tidal, and Wave) are available, and so it needs to be stored.

We wonder if Hydrogen could be the answer, or at least part of the answer, and we think it can.

This tutorial will try to answer some of the many questions related to making hydrogen the solution for our needs and for our biosphere, in order to reach the Net Zero era. How to produce, transport, store and use hydrogen? What should we measure, or learn to measure, to enable hydrogen-based solutions? Further, we explore how systems thinking through data analyses, modelling and simulation, forms a significant aspect in helping us to find feasible solutions to these questions.

Michele Ferrazzini CEO of ESE Engineering Services for Energy, Co-Founder of EconScienceH2, received the MSc in Electric Engineering (“ingegneria elettrotecnica”) from the Politecnico of Milan, in 1992. From 1992 until today, he worked in the power generation industry in some of the largest companies in this field, from Ansaldo Energia to ABB, from Alstom (now GE) to Sadelmi. He worked on energy projects in four continents, ranging from fossil to renewable energies, from hydro to coal, from gas to biomass, from photovoltaic to wastes, from geothermal to pumping storage. In the latest 13 years, he joined ESE, a consultancy and engineering company devoted to the power generation and storage, starting as Technical Manager and becoming Partner in 2013 and Managing Director in 2015. As ESE's director he helped the company to enter in the next era of innovative storage and renewable generation: i.e.: floating photovoltaic, new kind of biomass gasification, molten salts storage, hybrid plants combining fossil and renewable fuels, solutions for hydrogen production, storage and utilization.

At the beginning of 2021, together with Mr. Alessandro Giazotto (a Keynote Speaker in this IEEE workshop), he founded EconScience-H2, an international Think Tank, with the aim to build the Strategic Landscape/Ecosystem for the enablement of a Hydrogen based Net Zero World.

Dr Sanjiv Sharma is an Honorary Industrial Fellowship at the University of Bristol. Sanjiv retired from Airbus in 2019. At Airbus his role was as Technical Expert for Modelling & Simulation and has been leading research and application of Engineering Mathematics and Uncertainty Quantification & Management (UQ&M) in aircraft design. He also worked on the analyses of Landing Gear Systems through modelling and simulation, Product Integrity and Research & Technology Projects.

He has led systems engineering work packages on collaborative research projects in both European (FP7) and UK (ATI) projects. More recently, he led the application of UQ&M in the analyses of structures, control systems and mechatronics systems.

Dr Sharma obtained BSc (Eng) in Mechanical Engineering in 1982 at Imperial College, MSc in Control & Signal Processing in 1990 at the University of Portsmouth and PhD in Applied Mathematics from the University of the West of England. He is an Associate Member of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers and a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Application.