Professor Tony Vassallo

Professor Tony Vassallo
Delta Electricity Chair in Sustainable Energy Development
The School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
The University of Sydney
Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia
Tel: +61 2 9351 6740
Fax:+61 2 9351 2854
E-mail: t.vassallo@usyd.edu.au

Education:

B.App.Sc (Hons) 1977 UTS .
Ph.D 1986, Macquarie University. Thesis “An Isotopic and Magnetic Resonance Study of the Liquefaction Behaviour of Liddell Coal”.
Postgraduate studies in “Management of Innovation” at Macquarie University (2000)

Affiliations & Memberships:

Fellow, Royal Australian Chemical Institute
Fellow and Vice President, Australian Institute of Energy
Member of the Clean Energy Council of Australia.

Research Interests:

My primary research interests concern clean energy technologies and their role in mitigating climate change. In particular I have a strong interest in renewable energy technologies, their development and grid integration, and the use of energy storage to facilitate their uptake. One focus is on delivering energy storage solutions to facilitate the widespread uptake of renewable energy sources, such as large and medium-scale PV technology. These grid-connected hybrid PV-storage systems are capable of providing continuous, reliable power beyond sunlight hours to meet typical late evening and night-time demand. The importance of this is that it can reduce or eliminate eliminates the need to maintain high capacity grid supply for these installations and provides a base of dispatchable, secure renewable generation.
My interest in storage systems spans the use of supercapacitors for high power/low energy applications such as in hybrid electric vehicles, the use of regenerative fuel cells for domestic, commercial and precinct electricity storage, and the role of distributed storage in electricity networks.

Another focus is the use of smart grid technologies which will enable a more efficient use of existing resources resulting in less energy consumption and lower emissions, and provide the platform for emerging technologies such as distributed energy storage through plug-in hybrid and electric vehicles.

Academic Profile:

Tony joined the University in October 2008, following a few years as a consultant to industry in sustainable energy systems, and 20 years with the CSIRO in their fuel and energy divisions.

Publications:

Tony has over 70 peer reviewed publications in international journals, seven US and Australian patents and a few book chapters. He has also written many reports for industry and governments on sustainable energy systems.

Prospective Students:

If you are interested in a Masters or PhD research project I am currently starting projects in these areas:
The value of distributed storage in an electricity network
The effect of distributed generation and storage on network wide losses and emissions
The use of distributed resources to improve network power quality.

With colleagues I am also working in areas such as large scale solar thermal power generation, integrating large scale renewable generation into the transmission system and the use of IT and information systems in developing smart grids.
I also have a interest in carbon electrodes for energy storage systems, such as batteries, fuel cells and supercapacitors.