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Professor Gurgenci's current research interests include energy systems analysis; geothermal and concentrating solar thermal power plant technologies; development of intelligent tutoring and compterised assessment systems for teaching machine design.

Hal Gurgenci, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, has many years of industry and academic experience in solar energy, manufacturing and mining. Professor Gurgenci is the Founding Director of the Queensland Geothermal Energy Centre of Excellence (QGECE).

Scaling-up fermentation processes is not straightforward due to the emergence of concentration gradients at scale. For gas fermentation processes, with CO2, CO and CH4 and H2, scaling is even more challenging as high mass transfer rates need to be obtained. In his work, Lars is developing a framework to reliably scale-up gas fermentation processes, considering both mass transfer and concentration gradients. We aim to employ mechanistic models, combined with wet-lab data, to develop relationships and fluid dynamic (CFD) models to estimate the fermentation performance at industrial scale. He specialised in topics like bioreactor and bioprocess design, bioprocess scale-up/scale-down, mass transfer and transport phenomena, metabolic and kinetic modelling and simulation techniques.