Open student projects

If you are interested in working on a Bachelor, Semester, or Master project with us, you can find the projects we currently offer below or on external page SIROP. For further information, visit our student projects page for more insight into previous student work done with the Chair.

In case you have project ideas not currently related to any of these projects, please feel free to propose your own project and send your ideas, along with your CV and transcripts, to 

ETH Zurich uses SiROP to publish and search scientific projects. For more information visit sirop.org.

Spatial planning of repurposed gas networks and their interaction with electricity distribution networks

• Green hydrogen is expected to contribute to decarbonization of industrial processes, energy storage and other sectors that are difficult to electrify directly. • The development of hydrogen infrastructure may involve both the construction of new pipelines and the repurpose of parts of the existing natural gas network. Reusing existing corridors could reduce construction requirements, costs and spatial impacts. • Existing hydrogen infrastructure studies commonly follow one of the two approaches: System-level optimization of hydrogen production, demand and transportation or Detailed assessment of gas pipeline conversion and hydraulic feasibility. • Develops a high-resolution framework combining existing gas infrastructure, Steiner-tree-based hydrogen topology development, and fluid-dynamic validation. Their results show that new corridors and network reinforcements remain necessary. • At distribution-grid level, demonstrates that hydrogen conversion must be assessed using spatially and temporally resolved network-development pathways rather than assuming that all existing gas infrastructure remains useful. Their results also question whether infrastructure reuse is necessarily economically preferable to electrification. • Spatial hydrogen supply-chain models optimize production and transportation technologies but frequently assume that the electricity network can accommodate the additional load from electrolysis. identified this as an important limitation because electricity constraints are likely to become relevant at geographically resolved scales. • Electricity-hydrogen planning research increasingly considers electrolyzers, hydrogen storage and electricity networks together. Nevertheless, much of the literature concentrates on technology sizing or idealized energy hubs rather than connecting a reconstructed existing gas network to a geographically corresponding electricity distribution network

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Master Thesis

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Published since: 2026-08-24

Organization Chair of Energy Systems Analysis

Hosts Reyes Wendy , McKenna Russell

Topics Engineering and Technology

District heating distribution network capital cost in Switzerland

Increasing digitalisation and AI adoption are paralleled by the expansion of digital infrastructures, such as data centres (DCs). Their sector-coupling capabilities raise the question of where they could be integrated into multi-energy systems economically. One important aspect of their waste heat reuse is the cost of the district heating infrastructure required to distribute the heat to consumers. District heating distribution network costs have been found to be dominated by the capital cost. While these have been studied for the United Kingdom and countries of the European Union, a similar assessment is still missing in Switzerland.

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Semester Project

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Published since: 2026-08-13

Organization Chair of Energy Systems Analysis

Hosts Schmidt Franziska , McKenna Russell

Topics Engineering and Technology

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