The Institute for Advanced Energy Technologies (ITAE) was established in Messina in 1980 by the National Council of Research (CNR), the main Italian research public organization. ITAE has long experience in environmentally friendly production, storage and use of energy, and has been contributing to development and penetration of technologies related to energy saving, low polluting energy production, renewable energy sources, hydrogen and fuel cells in Italy and Europe since the early 80’s.

In the field of thermally driven adsorption heat pumps and chillers, ITAE research activity in GEOFIT concerns several fields, covering different levels of development of the adsorption machine. Valeria Palomba, graduated in Materials Engineering at the University of Messina and working at ITAE, is one of the women actively participating in the project, and her work is focused on the development of thermal systems for energy conversion storage.

In this interview, Valeria Palomba talks about the challenges for women within Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics fields.

“…GEOFIT is deploying and demonstrating on the operational field different heating and cooling solutions exploiting geothermal energy as a source, so this project is important because we will have five operational sites where the potential of geothermal energy will be demonstrated…”