"Assistant Professor" Patricia Aranguren Garacochea visiting the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering.

We are happy about the visit from Spain! Patricia Aranguren Garacochea from the Public University of Navarre, Spain, is visiting us at the faculty this week. She teaches in Navarre in the subjects of heat transfer, thermal engineering, solar energy and heating and cooling technology. In her doctorate, the researcher has experimentally demonstrated that the residual heat of the exhaust gases from the combustion of a boiler and an industrial furnace can be used to generate electricity. In the tests to confirm this thesis, she obtained an amount of energy equivalent to the annual consumption of 40 households. Even as a child, Patricia liked to build things up and take them down again, examining them closely. Her current research focuses, on the one hand, on electricity generation from geothermal energy found in the Canary Islands and, on the other, on designing and developing thermoelectric HAVC for passive houses. In an internal THI lecture series "Energy - Environment - Sustainability", she reports to our students as well as interested colleagues about her research activities in the field of "Thermoelectric Cooling and Power Generation". In her workshop for us, she gives our students insights into the flow simulation software "Ansys Fluent" in her research area of thermoelectrics. There is a free version of this tool for numerical fluid mechanics for students, which will be introduced during the workshop and simple examples on the topic of thermal transfer will be solved.

The successful cooperation with international colleagues, such as Patricia Aranguren Garacochea, is very enriching for all participants. We would like to thank our colleague Professor Sabine Bschorer for the all-round successful stay and exchange at the THI and in Ingolstadt, which she organised for Patricia! Professor Sabine Bschorer is head of the Bachelor's degree programme in Energy Systems and Renewable Energies, which will celebrate its 10th anniversary on 24.04.2022.

Personal details:
Patricia Aranguren Garacochea studied Industrial Engineering and did her Master's in Applied Mechanical and Computational Engineering at the Public University of Navarre (UPNA). After receiving a predoctoral fellowship, she has been working in the UPNA Thermal and Fluid Engineering Research Group since 2012.
She has received four awards from the International Thermoelectric Society (ITS) for the results of her research. Furthermore, she has 30 JCR publications, 60 International Conference papers, 1 book chapter, 1 thermoelectric book edition and 1 international patent.