immo!nvest – Die Plattform für Standorte und Immobilien

Tag: Eidgenössischen Technischen Hochschule Lausanne

  • Swarms of drones measure traffic

    Swarms of drones measure traffic

    A team led by Professor Nikolas Geroliminis, head of the Laboratory for Urban Transport Systems ( LUTS ) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne , is measuring traffic with unprecedented accuracy. It uses swarms of drones to do this. It converts the video images into algorithms and analyzes the data. “Our goal is not to monitor traffic, but to find the causes of traffic jams and offer fact-based solutions,” postdoc Manos Barmpounakis is quoted as saying in a statement .

    The LUTS tested its multidisciplinary approach in 2018 and 2019. Last summer it was tested in the monitoring and evaluation of parking areas in the port of Pully VD. In mid-May 2022, a new experiment was conducted in Nairobi, the city ranked 4th in the world in terms of congestion. It turned out that cultural peculiarities such as the minibuses called Matatus, “which drop off and pick up passengers as required in an indescribable traffic chaos” also have to be taken into account. Traditional modeling approaches are not directly applicable to this.

    For further experiments, the laboratory received a grant from the innovation agency Innosuisse . This technology, called CityDronics, is to be further developed into a marketable solution by a start-up based in Switzerland. It will be the first to integrate drones into urban mobility. With multi-sensors, the drones could also measure exposure to CO2 and noise. Several cities are already interested in CityDronics.

  • Younergy issues green bond for solar energy

    Younergy issues green bond for solar energy

    According to a press release , Younergy Solar wants to democratize solar energy and is issuing a green bond worth CHF 5 million. Younergy’s business model is understood as democratization. The Lausanne-based company installs photovoltaic systems on the roofs of its customers and assumes the entire costs of installation, maintenance and monitoring. As a result, customers – from single-family homes to large companies – produce their own electricity without any upfront investment and instead only pay for the energy produced. When the amortization period has expired, the system becomes the property of the customer. This means that everyone can generate and use solar power regardless of their personal budget.

    “We are the only ones in Switzerland that cover single-family homes as well as buildings with larger roofs. That was the key to our rapid growth,” Pedro Miranda, CEO and co-founder of Younergy, is quoted as saying. “The energy transition is mainly taking place at the local level. That’s why we want to expand this solution further,” Miranda continues. The sharp increase in energy prices and the uncertain energy supply in connection with the geopolitical situation required local supply. Electricity prices are likely to rise by more than 20 percent in Switzerland in 2023. With the Younergy solution, on the other hand, significantly lower prices are possible for private individuals and companies. The demand is therefore increasing sharply.

    So far, the company, which was founded in 2015 by a group of solar energy experts at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne ( EPFL ) and is funded by the Swiss Federal Office of Energy ( SFOE ), already operates 480 such photovoltaic systems throughout Switzerland.

  • Phenomena presents the design of the main building

    Phenomena presents the design of the main building

    The design for the iconic buildings in the Phenomena exhibition was presented on July 6th in the new Limmattalbahn facility in Dietikon . According to a press release, the winning design for the main building, which is made entirely of wood, came from Professor Yves Weinand of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne ( EPFL ).

    After a word of welcome from the mayor of Dietic, Roger Bachmann, overall project manager Urs J. Müller presented the winning project of the architectural competition. “Phenomena provides the basis for a better understanding of central themes of the present and future. Therefore, it demands an architecture that corresponds to its objectives and promotes the improvement of our planet through the understanding and use of modern science,” Müller is quoted as saying.

    The main building on the Dietiker Niderfeld will be a structure made of regional logs. Intelligent robots process the natural trunks on site. You create a reusable plug-in system. After the phenomena, the wood can be used in other projects with almost no waste.

    “With the buildings of the phenomena I want to show how one of the oldest building materials – wood – in connection with modern digital tools promotes local use and circularity,” Weinand is quoted as saying. The architect and head of the IBOIS laboratory for wooden structures at EPFL and founder of the Bureau d’Études Weinand has designed and built numerous emblematic wooden buildings. For example, the Saint Loup chapel, the new Vaud Parliament or, more recently, the Vidy Theater pavilion in Lausanne.

  • New development to reduce railway noise

    New development to reduce railway noise

    Researchers from the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research ( Empa ), the University of Economics and Engineering of the Canton of Vaud and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne ( EPFL ) have jointly developed new rail pads. These components are mostly made of elastic plastic and are stuck between rails and concrete sleepers, as Empa explains in a press release . They are used to protect rails.

    However, existing rail pads have limitations. Especially if the protection of the rails is greatly increased, this leads to more noise pollution at the same time. The researchers now want to solve this challenge. After several tests in the laboratory, a part with more than 50 percent polyisobutylene (PIB) content, embedded in a shell made of a harder ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA) plastic, proved to be the most effective option. At the same time, it can reduce railway noise and protect the rails.

    In a next step, the new rail pads are to be tested on a railway line in Nottwil in March. “These rail pads are easy to make. We will need almost 400 units for the 100-metre stretch,” explains Bart van Damme from Empa’s Acoustics and Noise Reduction department. That is why a company is already on board that will take over the manufacture of the components that have already been patented.

  • Multifunctional building boards reduce energy

    Multifunctional building boards reduce energy

    Multifunctional building panels made from fiberglass-polymer composites could significantly reduce the energy consumption of buildings. This is the conclusion reached by researchers from the Laboratory for Heat Technology for the Built Environment ( TEBEL ) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne ( EPFL ). Such composite materials could become the most important building materials alongside concrete, steel and wood, according to a press release from EPFL.

    "With the current construction methods, each building element only fulfills a single function", the assistant professor at the EPFL faculty for architecture, civil and environmental engineering and TEBEL director, Dolaana Khovalyg, is quoted as saying. This is "out of date and labor-intensive and time-consuming". As a result, the conventional construction method is associated with a high proportion of bound energy. Alternative solutions are modular, prefabricated, multifunctional building elements. They could reduce the embodied energy of buildings.

    Engineers from TEBEL and the Composite Construction Laboratory have shown that panels made of fiberglass-polymer composites can be used as structural elements in buildings. The team has developed a system in which water circulates through the hollow structures and the panels become elements for underfloor heating. It is also possible to use the hollow cells for electrical lines and ventilation ducts. This would also improve the use of the building space.

    Computer simulations on a building in the EPFL Innovation Park have shown that the panels guarantee sufficient thermal efficiency and structural fire resistance. In addition, their construction offers the same room comfort as conventional underfloor heating. Because of the lower water temperature, it would use much less energy.

  • EPFL exhibits Design Brain in Seoul

    EPFL exhibits Design Brain in Seoul

    The Media x Design Laboratory of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne ( EPFL ) is currently exhibiting a larger-than-life design brain in the South Korean capital. The exhibit called Artificial Swissness can be seen until October 31 at the Seoul Biennale for Architecture and Urbanism .

    According to a communication from EPFL, Artificial Swissness aims to extend the epistemology of computer science to the cultural field. “Our design brain is an experiment on the question of whether machines can design structures,” laboratory director Professor Jeffrey Huang is quoted as saying. “That means whether they can not only recommend music or drive cars, but also create meaningful cultural artefacts, such as architecture with distinctive Swiss characteristics.”

    As the message goes on to say, the exhibit should be a constantly changing spatial interface that represents the inner thoughts of an artificial intelligence machine that has been trained on 10,000 images of Swiss chalets and alpine architecture. “We make the visual interferences in these layers of the neural network visible,” say the two EPFL students Frederick Kim and Mikhael Johanes. “This gives us an insight into the inner workings of our generative artificial network that creates architectural images.” The two of them set up the installation in Seoul after a 14-day quarantine.

    The digital screens of the installation show the machine-generated images of typical Swiss architecture. At the same time, an LED projection reveals the constantly evolving learning process that the machines go through while they sift through thousands of images of alpine architecture in order to distill the essence of “Swissness”.

  • Switzerland has great potential for geothermal energy

    Switzerland has great potential for geothermal energy

    Switzerland has considerable potential in the use of alternative energy sources such as geothermal energy and in the underground storage of CO2. This emerges from a press release from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne ( EPFL ). Professor Lyesse Laloui from the Faculty of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering ( ENAC ) at EPFL was head of the research group on geoenergy as part of the Innosuisse Energy funding program, which ran from 2013 to 2020. Eight competence centers have been set up. EPFL played a leading role in the field of geoenergy. Laloui is the author of the chapter on this in the final report of Innosuisse.

    Lyesse Laloui sees great potential for the use of geothermal energy. The Swiss government has set the target for 2035 of generating 11 percent of the energy used for heating and cooling buildings from geothermal energy. Laloui assumes over 20 percent. “The project results show that this share could easily be doubled,” he is quoted in the communication. The possibilities of using geothermal energy to generate electricity were also examined. Laloui points out problems such as drilling deep without triggering seismic movements. “One day we will surely make it, but we are not there yet.”

    According to the Lalouis report, there are good opportunities for the underground storage of CO2 emissions in Switzerland, especially in the Central Plateau from Friborg to Zurich. Professor Laloui is quoted as saying that of the around 40 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent that are emitted in Switzerland every year, around 12 million could be stored underground.

  • Sika takes over the market leader for green roofs in the USA

    Sika takes over the market leader for green roofs in the USA

    Sika is developing into number one for green roofs in North America: The producer of construction chemical product systems and industrial sealants and adhesives takes over the Chicago-based American Hydrotech Inc. and its Canadian subsidiary Hydrotech Membrane Corporation , based in Ville d'Anjou in the province of Quebec.

    According to a press release from Sika, the company is the “clear market leader” for green roofs as an “established and recognized manufacturer of liquid membranes”. Hydrotech also has a strong market position when it comes to waterproofing the roofs and foundations of shopping centers. In 2020, the company achieved sales of CHF 83 million.

    “With the takeover, we will become the clear market leader in the rapidly growing application areas of green roofs and building waterproofing,” says Christoph Ganz, Sika's regional manager for the Americas. The fact that Hydrotech offers long-lasting products made with 40 percent recyclates “fits perfectly with Sika's sustainability strategy and strengthens our position in large cities, where green roofs are becoming increasingly important”.

  • Enerdrape wins with climate panels for buildings

    Enerdrape wins with climate panels for buildings

    Enerdrape has 150, 000 francs under the support of Venture Kick obtained as from a message stating. The spin-off from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne ( EPFL ) is developing a sustainable solution for air conditioning in buildings. The start-up's system consists of modular panels that are installed indoors. These use the existing thermal energy and waste heat to heat and cool the building.

    According to Enerdrape, heating and cooling buildings alone are responsible for around 40 percent of CO2 emissions in Europe. According to the start-up, sustainable alternatives often require a complex installation process and are also expensive. In contrast, the solution from Enerdrape is cheap and easy to implement. The company's panels are particularly intended for installation in underground garages and commercial buildings. In Europe, Enerdrape sees a potential market of CHF 40 million here.

    The Venture Kick funding initiative supports young companies from the idea to the establishment of a company. The Venture Kick Foundation mandated the institute for young companies , which is represented in Schlieren ZH, St.Gallen and Lausanne, to carry out the initiative.

  • Artificial intelligence recognizes the type of land use

    Artificial intelligence recognizes the type of land use

    Thanks to a student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne ( EPFL ), the regularly necessary classification of land use is now much less time-consuming than before. According to a press release from the university, she has developed and trained her own machine learning algorithm that can not only distinguish forests from other types of land. Instead, Valérie Zermatten's algorithm also recognizes rivers, lakes, camping and sports fields, cemeteries, water treatment stations, public parks, airports and dams. This makes it clearly superior to the algorithm developed by the Federal Statistical Office (FSO) called Areal Statistics Deep Learning, or ADELE for short.

    The results produced by their program as part of a master’s thesis are similar to the official data published by the FSO. According to the announcement, this suggests that it could be used for land use classification in the future. The big advantage lies in the processing time for aerial photos, because their classification into around 40 different categories is still largely done by hand.

    All of Switzerland is photographed from the air every three years. Because manual categorization takes so long, the results are only published every six years. With this mapping, land consumption can be better tracked, soil permeability can be monitored and urban sprawl can be combated.

    “Our goal is not to replace humans with artificial intelligence,” says Devis Tuia, one of Zermatt's doctoral supervisors at EPFL. “Although Valérie's algorithm will reduce the amount of tedious work that has to be done manually.” But even then there is still enough for people to do – for example, to recognize whether it is a house or a school, a football field or a football field Wiese act.

  • Sika supports the introduction of Swiss eco-cement

    Sika supports the introduction of Swiss eco-cement

    LC3 stands for Limestone Calcined Clay Cement and was developed by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne ( EPFL ). It is a sustainable cement product that has a clinker content that is up to 50 percent lower than that of traditional cement. Clinker makes a significant contribution to CO2 emissions during cement production. In LC3, a large proportion of clinker is replaced with a new additive, which means that overall less CO2 is emitted in cement production.

    The Zug-based construction chemicals group Sika wants to support the market launch of LC3, as he writes in a press release. He wants to develop and offer special cement additives and concrete admixtures that help customers adapt their materials to the properties of LC3. This should enable the water consumption, workability, hardening and durability of the LC3 concrete to remain the same compared to conventional products. According to its own statements, Sika is also ready for “comprehensive product tests with interested customers”.

    "With these new LC3 products, we are putting the goals of our sustainability strategy into practice," said Frank Höfflin, Sika's head of technology, in the press release. “Our aim is to act as an enabler for sustainability in the construction industry and to develop more environmentally friendly and more efficient products,” he emphasizes.