Alessandro F Rotta Loria
Northwestern University, IL·Engineering·Early-career
The ground beneath cities is heating up and also holds an untapped energy resource. Both projects study how heat moves through soil and the underground structures built into it, such as basement walls, garages and metro stations.
- Fields
Engineering
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
subsurface urban heat islands
geothermal energy
thermal energy storage
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Measure the heat transfer, mass transfer and deformation of an underground garage wall retrofitted with geothermal panels, through continuous full-scale field monitoring of different fluid network setups.
- Validate finite element models with field data, then run parametric and building-energy simulations and life-cycle assessments of thermal storage across ground conditions, structure geometries and building types.
- Assess the social, economic and environmental impacts of geothermal thermal batteries on underserved and advantaged communities, using community surveys.
- Analyze long-term, heat-driven deformation of soils under and around buildings caused by subsurface urban heat islands, using Chicago's underground temperature sensing network and laboratory experiments.
- Develop physics-based and data-driven models that predict how subsurface heat islands evolve and affect geotechnical structures, at scales from individual buildings to districts.
More about the research
They also ask how temperature changes affect the deformation and performance of these structures.
Why it matters
Turning basements, garages and metro walls into thermal batteries could help decarbonize buildings, reduce grid dependence and widen access to clean energy in urban and underserved communities. Understanding how warming ground deforms soils could help cities and engineers design and protect foundations and underground infrastructure against this hidden hazard.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Mohammad Khosravi
Montana State University, MT·Engineering
Determine how microstructural features such as grain size, ice content and void structure control the large-scale mechanical properties of permafrost, using X-ray computed tomography imaging of frozen soil.
Jack Montgomery
Auburn University, AL·Engineering·Early-career
Use X-ray micro-CT imaging to determine how soil microstructure controls subsurface erosion rates in unsaturated soils.
Asegun Henry
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA·Engineering
Advance understanding of phonon transport, the atomic vibrations that carry heat, in disordered materials whose atoms lack a regular repeating arrangement, using advanced computational approaches.
The school
Northwestern University: 71 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 536 research doctorates a year.
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