 Welcome to this course. It is about modeling and simulation of energy conversion systems. We have put a lot of effort into it, so I truly hope you will like it. Here are the lecturers. One is of course myself, my name is Piero Colonna. I am the Professor of Propulsion and Power at the Aerospace Engineering Faculty. I've been dealing with energy conversion systems for a long part of my career, and in fact I taught a course on this subject already in the past. I will be lecturing the first two modules of this course. Then we have Dr. Francesco Casella. Thank you, Piero. I am Francesco Casella. I work at Politecnico di Milano. I am a control engineer, but throughout my career, I have been mostly focusing on dynamic modeling with an eye to control, focusing on energy systems, but also on engineering systems at large. I have been doing research on object-oriented modeling and modelica, an application of this to control design, model-based control design. So these are the topics I will teach you throughout this course. And then it is also my pleasure to introduce to you Wilfried Wisser. Hello, my name is Wilfried Fesser. I'm a part-time lecturer at Delft University on gas turbine performance and simulation. Outside my work at Delft University, I have 30 years' experience on gas turbine design, performance and simulation. I'm also the developer of the gas turbine simulation program GSB, which is the tool you will be using in module 10A. And last but absolutely not least, we have Dr. Carlo De Servi. Hello, my name is Carlo De Servi and I'm a researcher at the Flemish Institute for Technological Research in Belgium. My research work focuses mainly on C-turbogenerators and simulation and design methods for energy congressional systems. Indeed, of particular relevance for this course is my expertise in simulation and modeling of energy and propulsion systems. Thanks. And then I would like to thank Francesco, Wilfried and Carlo. I would like to start with something that I hope will inspire you. You probably recognize the engineer in the picture there, Leonardo Da Vinci. And one day I found a quote that I find quite compelling and I'd like to share with you, first in Italian, because it sounds almost like a poem. Coloro che si innamorano di pratica senza scienza sono come no chiero che entra in nave senza timone o bussola che mai a certezza dove va. And then my attempt at translation for you. Those who fall in love with practice without knowledge are like a helmsman who comes on board without helm and pompas and never gains certainty of where he's heading. Think about it. It has a lot to do with what you are going to hear in this course. What is the context of this course? It is modeling and simulation and you have been exposed to these concepts for a long time now and I'd like to focus your attention on several aspects that are quite general. Modeling can be an activity that can be assimilated to obtain information from something of which you know very little. That is what we call the black box and I would say that economics is close to that because it's based on things that cannot be naturally converted into mathematical equations. Think of course for instance of political opinions. Physiology is a little grayer in the sense that we do have some tools to model what happens in biological systems but still the level of uncertainty is extremely high and another system that is extremely complicated though arguably a little less than physiology is ecology and the study of the ecosystem progressed a lot in recent times also thanks to the power computers that we have at our disposals today. Chemical processes is something that gets a little closer to what we are going to tell you in this course and still when we think of chemistry very often that is extremely complicated and we have to resort to a statistical approach. Much more deterministic is the modeling of power plants for instance and talking about this course of power and propulsion systems in general and in some instances we know enough to say that we are closer to what we would define a white box. You will get practical information about this course on bright space so actually I will not spend much time on this now please consult the website. What are we going to see in this first module? First of all I would like to clarify what are we modeling and why which is of course a very important question to be answered. This has to do with the purpose which you will learn really guides the modeling effort a good engineer should always know very well why he is making this huge effort of developing system models. I will then describe to you the role of models within the context of this course propulsion and power systems I will tell you about several different modeling paradigms and of course about applications things you can do with the models you have learned to develop through some examples. Then I will also briefly describe the tools that we are going to use in this course they are both conceptual tools but also software tools and from the very beginning I will tell you about these nine steps method that we have devised and that will help you to consistently approach the problem of developing models. I will introduce you to the nomenclature and units we use in this course and I hope you will like a first simple example in which you will see all the ingredients that I have listed before.