horizon 2020 – Progress in Research

The Horizon 2020 project DESOLINATION aims to design innovative technologies related to both concentrated solar power and desalination, to improve the efficiency of existing concepts. Not only will improvement be made on the independent systems but also on their coupling taking advantage of the mutual interactions and potentialities.

DESOLINATION focuses on the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region to test and deploy its technology and in particular this first prototype to be built on the premises of King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. It is expected that the DESOLINATION prototype will provide low-cost renewable electricity and low-cost fresh water, matching the countries’ requirements for efficient and accessible production of water. The final system will also benefit from a substantial reduction of CO2 emissions from traditional desalination systems.

DESOLINATION will innovate on different fronts. On the concentrated solar side, carbon dioxide blends will be the core of the innovation, leading to more efficient and less expensive power cycles and controllable parameters. On the water side, forward osmosis will be developed and linked to membrane distillation using the wasted heat of the power cycle to generate freshwater. Finally, a unique combination of the power and water cycles will allow the disruptive coupled system to work at high waste-heat-to-freshwater conversion efficiency.

The project, coordinated by Giampiero Manzolini (Department of Energy, Politecnico di Milano) will involve 19 partners from 9 EU countries and 3 GCC countries: 13 high-level universities and research centres (Politecnico di Milano, Fraunhofer Institute, Lund University, Cranfield University, Tekniker, Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology, University of Brescia, Technical University of Eindhoven, University of Maribor, Luleå University of Technology, King Saud University, University of Bahrain and German University of Technology) will work alongside 3 industrials (Baker Hughes, Cobra and ACSP), and 3 SMEs (Protarget, Temisth and Euroquality).

Reducing the impact of extreme climate events, identifying adaptation and mitigation strategies and managing the risks associated with such events is a challenge: climate services, which today can benefit from an incomparable amount of data, are particularly important in supporting strategic decisions.

The CLINT project – CLimate INTelligence, which is funded by the Horizon 2020 programme, aims to provide a tool to better harness the potential of this data. The main objective is the development of an artificial intelligence framework based on machine learning techniques and algorithms capable of processing large climate datasets in order to support climatological studies in the tracking, causal analysis and classification of extreme events such as tropical cyclones, heat waves, tropical nights and extreme droughts, but also of compound events and competing extremes.

Specifically, the framework will support the identification of spatial-temporal patterns and evolutionary dynamics of climatological fields associated with extreme events; the physics-based validation of climate system cause-effect relationships discovered by machine learning algorithms; the quantification of past and future extreme events by greenhouse gas emissions and other man-made forces.

The framework will also study the impact of extreme events on different socio-economic sectors under historical, predicted and projected climate conditions, developing innovative and sectoral climate services powered by artificial intelligence. These services will be tested on different spatial scales, from pan-European – where they will support EU policies related to the water-energy-food nexus (Water-Energy-Food Nexus) – to local, in three different types of climate hotspots.

Lastly, the services that are developed within the project will be made operational according to the most advanced open data and software standards in terms of Climate Services Information Systems and Web Processing Services, as well as a demonstration prototype of some of these services, in order to facilitate the understanding of the project results by public and private research bodies.

The project is coordinated by the Politecnico di Milano and led by Professor Andrea Castelletti of the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, as Scientific Coordinator.

Tag: horizon 2020

DESOLINATION

CLINT – CLimate INTelligence