Olaf Kolditz

Christoph Lehmann obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Physics from the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in 2011 and his Master’s in Physics from the University of Leipzig in 2013. He’s been working as a software developer at pwp-systems developing tools for traffic data analysis from 2011-2015. After working on scientific visualisation at the Institute of Computer Science at Leipzig University, he joined the UFZ in 2015 to work on the numerical simulation of thermochemical energy storage (TCES), especially systems based on water adsorption to zeolite. His research interests are the numerical assessment of the energy efficiency of those storage systems and the examination of the sortion kinetics of novel composite adsorbents, in particular zeolite granules impregnated with hygroscopic salts for the enhancement of the heat storage density.

Olaf Kolditz is the head of the Department of Environmental Informatics at the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research (UFZ). He holds a Chair in Applied Environmental System Analysis at the Technische Universität in Dresden. His research interests are related to environmental fluid mechanics, numerical methods and software engineering with applications in geotechnics, hydrology and energy storage. Prof. Kolditz is the lead scientist of the OpenGeoSys project, an open-source scientific software platform for the numerical simulation of thermo-hydro-mechanical-chemical processes in porous media, in use worldwide. He studied theoretical mechanics and applied mathematics at the University of Kharkov, got a PhD in natural sciences from the Academy of Science of the GDR (in 1990) and earned his habilitation in engineering sciences from Hannover University (in 1996), where he became group leader at the Institute of Fluid Mechanics. Until 2001 he was full professor for Geohydrology and Hydroinformatics at Tübingen University and director of the international Master course in Applied Environmental Geosciences. Since 2007 he is the speaker of the Helmholtz graduate school for environmental research HIGRADE. Prof. Kolditz is Editor-in-Chief of two international journals Geothermal Energy (open access) and Environmental Earth Sciences (ISI). Prof. Kolditz is a leading scientist in numerous Sino-German research networks.

Thomas Nagel is heading the groups “Computational Energy Systems” at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research—UFZ, as well as “Environmental Geotechnics: Multi-physics simulation for geotechnical system analysis”, a joint work group between the UFZ and the Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR). He holds an Adjunct Professorship at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. During his master’s studies of Mechanical Engineering/Applied Mechanics at Chemnitz University of Technology he worked on coupled problems in biomechanics and biomedical technology at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago and Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands. In 2012 he was awarded his PhD from Trinity College Dublin for a dissertation in mechanobiology. Since then he has been working at the UFZ as part of a team of scientists developing the numerical simulation framework OpenGeoSys for coupled multiphysical problems. His particular foci are thermochemical and sensible heat storage in porous media as well as geotechnical applications in the context of energy supply, storage and waste management.