Doctoral theses

Lithium-ion batteries are used in various application ranging from wearable electronic devices to electric vehicles with an ever-increasing demand. This increase has led to concern on some metal resources (lithium and cobalt mainly) that are today considered as both strategic and critical.

To meet environmental objectives, one of the main levers is the electrification of the vehicle fleet. This will lead to a sharp increase in the production of Li-ion batteries over the next decade. For environmental and geostrategic reasons, recycling these batteries in Europe will have to be set up.

Falling liquid films enhance heat and mass transfers in many systems or processes.

A new approach is emerging, which is expected to change the way we conceive and evaluate the future mobility of people and goods. Whether it will be more electrified, connected, automated, digitalized, or not, will depend on the targets we aim for at specific time horizons: environmental, economic, societal, etc.

In a context of increasingly tight resource management, the hydrometallurgy process is now essential for metal recycling. Hydrometallurgy involves dissolving the various metals contained in a material in aqueous solution, then separating them to recover them.

Electricity markets with high proportions of intermittent Renewable Energy Sources (RES) generation can experience periods of excess supply, resulting in near-zero and possibly negative prices, or energy spilling due to surplus.

In France and Europe, deep decarbonization scenarios aiming to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 rely heavily on direct electrical technologies for thermal and thermodynamic uses of industrial processes. Manufacturing accounts for a quarter of France’s CO2 emissions. There is large number of uncertainties about this transition.

The simulation of reactive transport in porous media is a major challenge for many IFPEN projects, especially in relation to new underground energies such as CO2 sequestration, geothermal energy and hydrogen storage.

The electric vehicle market is today a fast growing market. This induces the development of characterization techniques for the study of batteries materials.

Economical, geopolitical and social trends, apart from the well-posed environmental concerns, are possible to precipitate legislative actions for the partial substitution of Diesel by cleaner fuels in the imminent future. Besides, the already stringiest emission legislation referring to Diesel engines, e.g.

Permanent magnet synchronous machines are frequently used in transport electrification applications because of their high efficiency. The control of these machines requires knowing with precision the speed and the position of the rotor. Position sensors, habitually used, are efficient but present some inconvenient.

In order to gain more insight into physical processes, IFPEN develops or uses a large number of numerical simulators. These numerical models are useful to reproduce phenomena in specific conditions and thus to predict and explore the system response under various conditions.