Davide
Tonelli
Davide Tonelli is a third year PhD student at the Univeristé catholique de Louvain and the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium. He is a Visiting Scholar in Lorenzo Rosa's lab at Carnegie Science.
Overview
In 2021 he became fellow of Collège des Ingénieurs Italy, as part of the MBA program dedicated to PhD candidates. He graduated in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Genoa (2016), while receiving in parallel a diploma in trumpet at the conservatory of music G. Puccini. Afterwards, he joined ETH Zurich where he graduated in the M.Sc. Energy Science and Technology (2019). After an internship in the R&D Department of a gas turbine manufacturer and a short period as research assistant at ETH Zurich, his interest was captured by the rising role of hydrogen as a new carrier in the energy transition.
His research focuses on optimal design of hydrogen supply chain at different geographical scales of analysis. In the first part of his PhD, he worked on the integration of gradient-free optimization algorithms with mathematical programming to handle nonlinearities in the supply chain problem. He studied this integration with a case study of the Benelux area and a hydrogen demand associated to the chemical and the petrochemical industry.
The second part of his PhD concerns the definition of the optimal allocation of the production of renewable hydrogen at a global scale based on decarbonization scenarios for 2030 and 2050. His work will identify a benchmark evolution of the rising trade of hydrogen among countries with high potential of renewables and highly industrialized countries. As summer visiting student in the Department of Global Ecology at Carnegie Institution, he will work at the Rosa Lab to couple the cost-minimum allocation of hydrogen, with an analysis of the associated environmental impact.