Christos Markides
Professor Christos Markides is a major shareholder of Solar Flow and inventor of the award-winning patented Solar Flow technology. He completed a PhD in Energy Technologies at the Department of Engineering of the University of Cambridge in 2005. He was appointed Lecturer at Imperial College London in late 2008 and became Professor in 2018.
Christos is now Head of the Clean Energy Processes (CEP) Laboratory at Imperial, numbering 40+ members and whose research activities focus on renewable and high-efficiency energy technologies and systems, in particular through the understanding and development of new processes and methods for cooling, heating and power, and a particular on solar energy. The CEP’s activities has been supported by £30M+ of research grant funding. He has written 400+ scientific papers that have been either presented at important international conferences or published in leading academic journals.
Benjamin Franchetti
Dr Benjamin Franchetti received an MEng (Hons) in Mechanical Engineering from Imperial College London in 2009 and in 2013 received his PhD degree from Imperial in the area of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and turbulent combustion modelling. After his PhD he worked in the USA for a SME developing waste heat to power technologies for the transportation sector and in 2015 he returned to London, where he co-found Entropea Labs, a London based SME developing waste-heat to power technologies. As Managing Director, he oversaw product development, grew and managed a team of engineers and attracted £2M+ in UK innovation funding. In the summer of 2018, Ben left Entropea to pursue his love for bringing ideas to market, get them funded, create company structures around them, and grow the team, with a special focus in the clean technology sector.
Ben has authored dozens of scientific papers published in leading scientific journals and conference proceedings.
Yagos Pesmazoglou
Dr Yagos Pesmazoglou received an MEng (Hons) in Mechanical Engineering from Imperial College London in 2010. He received a PhD scholarship and in 2014 received his PhD degree from Imperial in the area of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and big data stochastic modelling. Following his studies, he worked for a Peru-based NGO offering his expertise for the development of next-generation, small-scale wind turbines for rural electrification, following which clean energy and technological impact evaluation have become for Yagos both an expertise and an objective.
In 2015 Yagos joined Ben at Entropea Labs as CTO and acted as project manager of £2M+ in UK innovation funding. He brought successfully a technology from the proof-of-concept to precommercial stages. He left Entropea in 2018 to join Solar Flow as CTO. Yagos has authored dozens of scientific papers published in leading scientific journals and conference proceedings. He continuous to be involved in new technology R&D, with an interest in the renewable energy sector and a particular focus on their techno-economic feasibility and potential impact on climate change, pollution and community empowerment.
Sara Riera
Dr Sara Riera Curt is currently working as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Clean Energy Processes (CEP) Laboratory at Imperial College London. She has a Bachelor’s degree (Hons) in Industrial Engineering, with electro-mechanical specialization, from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC). She received her PhD from the University of Lleida on a project focused on a cooling device for solar Concentrating Photovoltaic (CPV) systems. Prior to her doctorate, she worked as a project manager for Ros Roca Envirotec, developing and constructing waste treatment plants all over Europe.
Dr Riera research interests are in efficient, reliable and clean energies. She is an expert on cooling and solar CPV technologies and systems. In addition to this, she is experienced in microelectronics cooling, waste treatment, triage and electricity generation from biogas, especially in the design and construction of biomethanisation and composting plants.
Gan Huang
Dr Gan Huang is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Clean Energy Processes (CEP) Laboratory at Imperial College London. He received his PhD from Tsinghua University. Prior to joining Imperial College London, he worked as a Postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford. He spent time and gained research experience at the University of Pittsburgh in the USA, and also has engineering experience that he gained while working for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Japan.
Dr Huang’s current research focuses on next-generation solar technologies and, specifically, the development of the Solar Flow hybrid photovoltaic-thermal (PVT) solar panel. he is also an expert in advanced cooling technologies for ultra-high heat flux surfaces, including additive-manufactured micro-cooling structures and biomimetic transpiration cooling technologies. His research has been featured in the world’s leading physics magazine ‘Physics World’ in UK and ‘Advances in Engineering’ in Canada.