ARIEL UNIVERSITY
Providing tomorrow’s answers today
Dr Nir Tzabar, of Ariel University’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and Mechatronics, is one of many innovators working on sustainable energy solutions at the Ariel Energy Research Center. In particular, his TEST lab is reimagining heat into power
The Ariel Energy Research Center (AERC) unites all labs and departments investigating one topic: sustainable energy. Recognizing the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals call for an interdisciplinary approach, the hub – led by Dr Nir Tzabar, from the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Mechatronics – is a community of researchers from fields as varied as chemical engineering and computer sciences. They work to generate breakthroughs in five areas: energy storage, fuels and hydrogen, solar energy, high-power systems and water. Dr Tzabar is also head of AERC’s Thermal
Energy Science and Technology (TEST) Laboratory. One of the country’s leaders in the field of thermal energy, he has received grants from Israel’s Ministry of Energy and Ministry of Science and Technology to turn heat into power. Dr Tzabar hopes to harness sustainable energy
sources, such as the thermal energy of solar radiation and wasted heat, through new efficient processes. Imagine, for instance, a factory whirring and bellowing with various machines, each producing heat. Now, suppose this heat, before becoming intolerable to the workers, could be captured, converted into energy and stored in a veritable bank to power the factory itself. This is the aim of Dr Tzabar’s team: turn heat from a problem into a valuable resource.
That’s not the only focus of TEST. The planet’s
increasing population and better quality of life expectations have spiked energy demands, meaning we now require more electric power plants as well as larger electric transmission infrastructure. Cooling applications for industrial and private consumers (used in everything from food storage and air conditioning to energy preservation) account for approximately 40 percent of our entire electric consumption. To address the issue, Dr Tzabar has been conducting research on thermally driven cooling systems to replace electrically powered ones. Dr Tzabar states that if he had the power to
solve one energy issue, it would be reducing dependency on commercial electricity. “Everyone should be allowed to generate and store their own energy, from the macro level of nations to the micro one of private consumers,” he says. To this aim, all buildings could be transformed into autonomous energy-generating systems, providing for their own energy needs through a sustainable cycle: converting the heat they produce into energy, harnessing this energy to power their systems and releasing new heat to start the process over. This would diminish waste and dependency on both foreign energy supplies and fossil fuels. Thanks Dr Tzabar’s work, the building of the future is just around the corner.
The Ariel Energy Research Center promotes interdisciplinary research and coordinates activities with other institutes, government offices and companies
2022 | Israeli Academia 17
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