Marc Secanell – University of Alberta

Marc Secanell is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Alberta, Canada, and the director of the Energy Systems Design Laboratory. He received his Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Victoria, Canada, in 2008 and 2004, respectively. He holds a B.Eng. degree (2002) from the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (BarcelonaTech). In 2008, he was an Assistant Research Officer at the National Research Council of Canada, Institute for Fuel Cell Innovation in Vancouver, Canada and in 2015-16 he was a visiting research scholar in the Energy Conversion Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, US. His research interests are in the areas of: a) analysis and computational design of energy systems, such as polymer electrolyte fuel cells, polymer electrolyzers, flywheels and cooling towers, b) fabrication and characterization of polymer electrolyte fuel cells and electrolyzers, c) finite element analysis, and d) multidisciplinary design optimization. His current research projects include the development of the Open-source Fuel Cell Simulation Toolbox (OpenFCST), an open-source framework to analyze fuel cells, the development of mathematical models and optimization strategies for cooling towers and high-speed composite flywheels, and on the fabrication and characterization of low loading polymer electrolyte fuel cells, and high-speed composite flywheels. Within OpenFCST, his group is developing mathematical models for studying: a) multi-step electrochemical reactions, b) multi-component gas transport in porous media, c) multi-phase transport models in porous media; and, d) stochastic reconstruction and simulation of porous materials. He has authored 39 journal articles, 29 conference proceedings and two book chapters receiving over 1,000 citations (h-index: 19 in Google Scholar). He has been an invited speaker at prestigious conferences such as the Electrochemical Society Meeting and the Gordon Research Conference in Fuel Cells. He has received several awards including the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta (APEGA) Early Accomplishment Award (2013) and a Hydrogen and Fuel Cells.