Three Heki students receive an ESSOR graduate scholarship

We want to congratulate Axelle Cara, Ruben Ciriale, and Simone Barchi, who received an ESSOR graduate scholarship – Marthe-et-Robert-Ménard worth $10,000 to support their master’s degree at Heki!

Axelle, an intern at Heki since 2023, is completing her bachelor’s degree in engineering physics. She will begin her master’s degree in the fall of 2025, during which she will develop an experimental setup dedicated to studying the column vortices that occur in turbines operated at speed-no-load. Ruben and Simone respectively began their master’s degrees under the supervision of Sébastien Houde and Yves St-Amant in January after completing their end-of-studies internship at the laboratory in the summer of 2024. Ruben will study numerically the fluid-structure interactions in a Francis turbine runner whose blades have suffered different levels of damage. Simone will examine the effect of contact between strain gauges and water to identify failure mechanisms and develop suitable protection to make them waterproof.

We wish them success in their projects and look forward to the contributions they will make to hydropower research!