Outreach
Public Lecture by Prof. Bruno D’Aguanno: Entering the Solar Century
As part of his visit, Prof. Bruno D’ Aguanno from CIC Energigune, Parque Tecnológico, Miñano, Álava, Spain, will give a Public Lecture on Thursday the 7th of April, at 5.30 pm (room ENG207 in the Engineering Hub, building 13 on the university map). Everybody is welcome to join us in attending this interesting and accessible talk on renewable energies, concentrated solar power, and the role of thermodynamics in the energy debate about our future energy resources.
Entering the Solar Century
The role of thermodynamics to keep the energy debate clean

In this Lecture, accessible to the general public, Prof. D’ Aguanno will give an overview of the existing renewable energies based on the Sun and will contrast those with the non-renewable sources, using thermodynamics as a powerful tool of analysis. Thermodynamics is a descriptive science which allows a qualitative and quantitative description of our planet. Sustainability is instead a normative issue, and it belongs to the dimension of desirability (what kind of world do we want to live in today and in the future?). Thermodynamics is an essential tool in evaluating which resources to use and analyze the complex equilibrium between these resources and the waste materials produced. Therefore, thermodynamics contributes to clarify the natural constraints within which to move, before a choice about our future is made on the basis of some normative criteria.
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Prof. Bruno D’Aguanno is a physicist with a background in Statistical Mechanics and Condensed Matter Physics. He is active in promoting and coordinating European projects on concentrated solar power, energy storage and the development of materials for energy.
Published by Andrea Floris
Dr Andrea Floris is a Lecturer at the School of Mathematics and Physics, College of Science, University of Lincoln (United Kingdom).
He is a computational condensed matter physicist with expertise in density functional theory (DFT), molecular self-assembly, computational superconductivity, vibrational properties, and nanostructured systems.
He obtained his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Cagliari (Italy) with a thesis focussed on the implementation and application of the DFT for Superconductors (SCDFT), a theory able to predict the critical temperature of conventional superconductors in the absence of empirical parameters.
In 2004 he moved to Freie Universität Berlin, where he worked several years in further developing and applying the SCDFT theory to many materials under different conditions of pressure and electron-phonon coupling.
In 2007-2013, he was also was visiting researcher at the University of Minnesota (USA), where he extended the DFT+U method to the density functional perturbation theory, to calculate phonons spectra of materials having a strong electronic correlation.
In 2010-2015, he worked first as Research Associate then as Visiting Lecturer at King´s College London, on the self-assembly of organic molecules on surfaces, which is his currently his main research field.
In 2015 he was Associate Researcher at CIC Energigune, Spain.
During many years of research activity, he established collaborations with theoretical and experimental groups in Europe, UK, USA and China. He also enjoyed doing experiences of mentoring and teaching, supervising Ph.D. and master students in Freie Universitaet Berlin, King’s College London and Wuhan University (China).
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