Titles

• Assistant Research Scientist, LightWorks^®

Biography

Alberto de la Calle is an assistant research scientist at Arizona State University (United States) since August 2019. He has a BS in physics (2008) and an MS in applied physics (2009) from the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain). In 2015, he obtained his PhD in system and control engineering from the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED; Spain) which was performed in the Solar Research Centre: Plataforma Solar de Almería. He did a research stay of 3 months at ETH (Switzerland) during his PhD. His thesis was recognized with the doctorate extraordinary award by the UNED (Spain) in 2016. After this, he worked nine months at CIESOL Research Centre for Solar Energy (Spain) as a research assistant. Then, he worked 3 years as postdoctoral fellow in the Solar Thermal Processes team at CSIRO Energy (Australia) recruited under the Australian Solar Research Iniciative (ASTRI). Currently, he holds a postdoctoral scholar at ASU LightWorks®. 

His main expertise is the modelling and simulation of large and complex thermodynamic systems which collects most of his scientific achievements. Specifically, he has focused on thermochemical systems with a special emphasis in phase transitions and chemical reactions. Although all his scientific work can be collected on the concentrating solar thermal technology, he has worked on almost all the areas of this technology: from collectors (heliostat fields, parabolic troughs, compound parabolic concentrators) and receivers (sodium, molten salt, direct steam generation), through heat exchangers and thermal energy storages (sensible heat and latent heat), to power blocks (Brayton and Rankine). In addition, he also worked in non-electricity applications such as solar fuels or solar desalination. All these models have been used to design and optimize the systems, to develop new control strategies which allows the increase in the efficiency and/or the reduction of the capital costs.

SCOPUS: https://www.scopus.com/authid/detail.uri?authorId=57201535759

ResearchID: https://publons.com/researcher/AAA-6825-2020

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=cRC_JegAAAAJ

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5510-7943