Lyesse Laloui delivers honorary Gerald A. Leonards Lecture
© 2014 EPFL – Alain Herzog
In celebration of his achievements in the research of thermo-active foundations, Lyesse Laloui was invited to give this year’s honorary Gerald A. Leonards Lecture at Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana (USA).
Underground, the shallow depths are a reliable, relatively constant source of heat that, among other applications, can be used to keep buildings cool in the summer and warm in the winter. Extracting the heat from the subsurface, however, is not that simple. Changes in temperature can lead the foundations to contract or expand, thereby potentially destabilizing the buildings or other structures they carry. Tackling these challenges is central to the improvement of thermal pile foundations and their long-term durability.
For his Gerald A. Leonards Lecture, held on April 26, Laloui, head of EPFL’s chair in Soil Mechanics, Geo-Engineering and CO2 Sequestration, presented the results of experiments carried out on full-scale energy piles. These experiments enabled the development of Thermo-Pile, a software tool that helps engineers improve the design of thermo-active foundations. He then went on to present a range of innovative applications that exploit shallow geothermal heat, including a solution that uses stored heat from the summer to de-ice bridges in the winter.