Manuel Blanco Muriel

Manuel Blanco Muriel

COMMONWEALTH SCIENTIFIC AND INDUSTRIAL RESEARCH ORGANIZATION (CSIRO) Australia

Manuel J. Blanco has more than thirty years of experience as a solar researcher, contributing to advancing the state-of-the-art of Concentrating Solar Thermal (CST) technologies. A former Director of the Solar Thermal Energy Department of CENER, the National Renewable Energy Centre of Spain, and of the Plataforma Solar de Almería, the largest European solar research infrastructure, Dr. Blanco is an expert on Thermodynamics, Heat Transfer, Optics, and Modelling of Energy Systems. Currently, he is: Science Leader of the Solar Energy Systems Research Group of CSIRO, the Australian National Science Agency, one of the largest in the world; Director of the Australian Solar Thermal Research Initiative (ASTRI), an 8-year 87-seven million dollars research program to increase the cost competitiveness of CST technologies, which in addition to CSIRO involves six Australian universities and the collaboration of several US National Laboratories and universities; General Coordinator of EU-SOLARIS, a 4-year 6-million Euros European FP7 project whose goal is to carry out all the preparatory activities needed to create an international organization to manage, as a Distributed Large European Research Infrastructure, the CST research infrastructures of eleven European and Mediterranean research centres; Chair of the Executive Committee of SolarPACES, the Implementing Agreement of the International Energy Agency responsible for promoting the development and deployment of solar thermal power technologies and the solar-assisted manufacture of fuels and chemicals.

Research stay at UC3M: DEPARTMENT OF THERMAL AND FLUIDS ENGINEERING

Project:  To establish a fruitful and lasting collaboration between the Energy System Engineering (ISE) Research Group of the Department of Thermal and Fluids Engineering of the Carlos III University (UC3M) and CSIRO’s Solar Energy Systems Research Group in the CST field within the framework of the ASTRI research program. This collaboration is structured around the following activities: The development and validation of open source tools for the modelling and optimization of CST systems and subsystems; The exchange of researchers (professors and graduate students) between UC3M and the Australian ASTRI partners; The contribution of Manuel J. Blanco to the development and delivery of the “Solar Engineering” UC3M course.

Stay period: SEP 2015 - AUG 2016