Evaporation is a ubiquitous phenomenon in nature, yet our understanding on evaporation is surprisingly insufficient. For example, large temperature discontinuities across liquid-vapor interfaces had been reported experimentally, which have defied modelling efforts so far. We established a set of interfacial conditions to determine the interfacial temperature, density, and pressure drop across a liquid-vapor interface, which lead to modeling results in reasonable agreement with experimental data. Our model shows when evaporation or condensation happens, an intrinsic temperature difference develops across the liquid-vapor interface, due to the mismatch of the enthalpy carried by vapor at the interface and the bulk region. We predict that when the liquid layer is very thin, most of the applied temperature difference between the solid wall and the vapor phase happens at the liquid-vapor interface, leading to saturation of the evaporation and the condensation rates and the corresponding heat transfer rate. This result contradicts current belief that the evaporation and condensation rates are inversely proportional to the liquid film thickness. Our approach also provides clear explanation for the paradoxical prediction by the kinetic theory the existence of an inverted vapor temperature profile for the problem of evaporation and condensation between two parallel plates. Along a different direction, our experiments, as well as by many others, have reported that evaporation under sunlight from hydrogel and other porous materials can exceed the thermal evaporation limit by several times. We hypothesize that photons can directly cleave off water clusters at the liquid-vapor interface in a way similar to the photoelectric effect, which we call the photomolecular effect. We use several independent experiments in porous hydrogels and at a single water-air interface to support this hypothesis.

Gang Chen is currently Carl Richard Soderberg Professor of Power Engineering at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He attended Xiangfan No. 5 High School in China from 1978-1980. He received his bachelor and master degrees from the Power Engineering Department, Huazhong Institute of Technology (now Huazhong University of Science and Technology or HUST in short), China, in 1984 and 1987, respectively. He stayed at HUST as a lecturer from 1987-1989. In 1988, he was interviewed by Professor Chang-Lin Tien as a PhD candidate to receive a fellowship from the K.C. Wong Education Foundation in Hong Kong. He joined Professor Tien’s group first at UC Irvine in 1989 and then at UC Berkeley in 1990 when Professor Tien rejoined Berkeley as its Chancellor. He obtained his PhD degree from the Mechanical Engineering Department, UC Berkeley in 1993, under Tien’s supervision. He was an assistant professor at Duke University from 1993 to 1997, a tenured associate professor at University of California at Los Angeles, from 1997 to 2001. He joined MIT in 2001 as a tenured associate professor, and was promoted to full professor in 2004. He was named a Warren Faculty Scholar at Duke University (1996-1997), and he was the first holder of the Warren and Towneley Rohsenow Professorship at MIT (2006-2009) before assuming the Soderberg Professorship from MIT School of Engineering in 2009. He served as the Head of the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering from July 2013 to June 2018.

Chen’s research interests center on nanoscale transport and energy conversion phenomena, and their applications in energy storage, conversion, and utilization. He has made important contributions to the understanding of heat conduction in nanostructures beyond Fourier diffusion regime via both modeling and experimental studies. He and his collaborators invented ways to extract phonon mean free path distributions in solids by exploiting ballistic phonon transport processes and advanced first principles simulation tools to compute phonon thermal conductivity. His group, working with collaborators, discovered Anderson localization in heat conduction and phonon hydrodynamics in graphite. He and his collaborators exploited the unique nanoscale heat conduction physics to advance the field of thermoelectric materials and their applications in solar thermal and waste heat recovery. He and his collaborators also discovered a few materials with thermal conductivity just below diamond, including predicting and experimentally demonstrating that boron arsenide have simultaneously high electron and hole mobility in addition to experimentally proving its predicted high thermal conductivity. His group demonstrated that polymer nanofibers can be more thermally conductive than most metals, and explained mechanisms why additives to liquids might significantly improve their thermal conductivity. In addition to nanoscale heat conduction and thermal and thermoelectric materials, Chen’s group also advanced the field of thermal radiation, including developing a method to measure radiation heat transfer between two surfaces down to tens nanometer separations and experimental demonstration that radiative heat transfer at such small spacings can exceed the prediction of the Planck blackbody radiation law by three orders of magnitude, photon trapping in solar photovoltaic cells, solar thermal and solar interfacial steam generation. In 2021, he discovered photomolecular effect: direct cleavage of large water molecular clusters from water-vapor interface by visible light. By exploring micro/nanoscale transport phenomena, Chen’s group has advanced a wide range of technologies such as thermoelectric cooling and power generation, solar thermal and solar photovoltaics, desalination, and thermal interface materials. Two of Chen and his collaborators’ inventions were selected by Scientific American as one of the annual top ten world changing ideas: one on directional solvent extraction technology for desalination and waste water treatment (2012) and one on using batteries to convert thermal energy into electricity (2014). He and his collaborators’ work on cubic boron arsenide was selected by the Physics World as one of its top ten Breakthroughs of the Year in 2022. Chen authored a book entitled “Nanoscale Energy Transfer and Conversion: a parallel treatment of electrons, molecules, phonons, and photons” - the first textbook in the field and his lectures in videos are freely available online via the MIT Open Courseware program. He has published ~460 technical articles, 24 book chapters, and over 600 invited talks all over the world. Professor Chen has supervised ~90 MS and PhD students thesis and over 60 post-docs. More than 40 of his PhD students and post-docs are in academia. He is an inventor on ~50 granted and pending patents and co-founded two companies. 

Heterogeneous Integration (HI) is a powerful and crucial enabler for the continued growth of computing and communication performance.  Advanced packaging technologies are critical enablers of HI because of their importance as compact, power efficient platforms. This talk will focus on the tremendous opportunities in different application environments and focus on the projected evolution of advanced packaging architectures.  Interest in HI research has picked up in recent years and this opens up greater collaboration opportunities between academia and industry.  Specific examples, showing how product implementations take advantage of currently available HI technologies, to provide an unprecedented level of performance, will be used to describe the challenges and opportunities in developing robust, next generation advanced package architectures. A broad scope roadmap of the future generated as part of an industry-academic collaboration will be discussed in this context to highlight the opportunities generated by HI.  The anticipated challenges and opportunities in the thermal management of HI based architectures will be discussed in detail.

Ravi Mahajan is an Intel Fellow responsible for Assembly and Packaging Technology Pathfinding for future silicon nodes. Ravi also represents Intel in academia through research advisory boards, conference leadership and participation in various student initiatives. He has led Pathfinding efforts to define Package Architectures, Technologies and Assembly Processes for multiple Intel silicon nodes including 90nm, 65nm, 45nm, 32nm, 22nm and 7nm silicon. Ravi joined Intel in 1992 after earning his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Lehigh University. He holds the original patents for silicon bridges that became the foundation for Intel’s EMIB technology. His early insights have led to high-performance, cost-effective cooling solutions for high-end microprocessors and the proliferation of photo-mechanics techniques for thermo-mechanical stress model validation. His contributions during his Intel career have earned him numerous industry honors, including the SRC’s 2015 Mahboob Khan Outstanding Industry Liaison Award, the 2016 THERMI Award from SEMITHERM, the 2016 Allan Kraus Thermal Management Medal & the 2018 InterPACK Achievement award from ASME, the 2019 “Outstanding Service and Leadership to the IEEE” Awards from IEEE Phoenix Section & Region 6 and most recently the 2020 Richard Chu ITherm Award and the 2020 ASME EPPD Excellence in Mechanics Award. He is one of the founding editors for the Intel Assembly and Test Technology Journal (IATTJ) and currently VP of Publications & Managing Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions of the CPMT. He has long been associated with ASME’s InterPACK conference and was Conference Co-Chair of the 2017 Conference. Ravi is a Fellow of two leading societies, ASME and IEEE.  He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2022 for contributions to advanced microelectronics packaging architectures and their thermal management.

Meeting global energy needs in a carbon-constrained world is driving energy innovation. An abundance of clean and resilient energy is needed to lift nearly six billion people out of energy poverty while simultaneously reducing carbon emissions. Energy innovations such as wind, wave, solar power, and small modular reactors (SMR) rely on thermal and fluid engineering to design, scale, optimize, and validate their clean energy systems. This presentation will provide insights from NuScale Power on how thermal and fluid engineering was used to develop its SMR and how they are currently being used to develop Integrated Energy Systems to meet 21^st century climate goals.

José N. Reyes, Ph.D., co-founded NuScale Power, LLC, co-designed the NuScale passively-cooled small nuclear reactor and has served as the company’s Chief Technology Officer since 2007. Dr. Reyes is an internationally recognized expert on passive safety system design, testing and operations for nuclear power plants. He has served as a United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency technical expert on passive safety systems, is a co-inventor on more than 180 patents granted or pending in 20 countries and has received several national awards including the 2013 Nuclear Energy Advocate Award, the 2014 American Nuclear Society Thermal Hydraulic Division Technical Achievement Award, the 2017 Nuclear Infrastructure Council Trailblazer Award, the 2021 American Nuclear Society Walter H. Zinn Medal, and 2021 inductee into the University of Maryland Innovators Hall of Fame.

Dr. Reyes is a fellow of the American Nuclear Society (ANS), a NURETH fellow, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. In the past, he has served as head of the Oregon State University (OSU) Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiation Health Physics, directed the Advanced Thermal Hydraulic Research Laboratory and was the Co-Director of the Battelle Energy Alliance Academic Center of Excellence for Thermal Fluids and Reactor Safety in support of the Idaho National Laboratory mission.

Dr. Reyes currently serves as a Professor Emeritus in OSU’s School of Nuclear Science and Engineering. He holds Ph.D. and Master of Science degrees in nuclear engineering from the University of Maryland and a Bachelor of Science degree in nuclear engineering from the University of Florida. He is the author of numerous journal articles and technical reports, and he has given lectures and keynote addresses to professional nuclear organizations in the United States, Europe and Asia. He is a licensed professional engineer in the state of Oregon.

Thermal radiation is an important heat transfer mechanism in combustion environment, such as in fire and gas turbine combustors.  Emitted and absorbed by participating media such as CO2, H2O, CO and soot, thermal radiation can change temperature distribution, and subsequently impacts ignition and extinction of flames as well as pollutant emission. Thermal radiation that reaches the combustor enclosures contributes directly to local heat flux and can sometimes lead to increased thermal stress and eventual failure of the enclosing material. Modeling of radiation in combustion systems has always been a challenge, due to its complexity and potentially prohibitive computational cost. In this presentation, we present our recent efforts in applying Monte Carlo ray tracing solver with line-by-line spectral dataset to a series of flames, including laminar flames, a small heptane pool fire, and a gas-turbine combustor. Characteristics of radiation in combustion is delineated through these examples and a reduced-order model is proposed. Finally, our latest effort in developing a GPU-accelerated Monte Carlo ray tracing (MCRT) solver is presented. The computational cost is significantly reduced, making the solver a possible game-changer for modeling thermal radiation in combustion applications.

Prof. Xinyu Zhao is an associate professor at University of Connecticut. She joined the Mechanical Engineering Department in Spring 2015 as an assistant professor, and prior to that, she was a postdoctoral research fellow in Combustion Energy Frontier Research Center at Princeton (2014), co-sponsored by Sandia National Laboratory and Pennsylvania State University. She received her Ph. D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Pennsylvania State University (2013), and she received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Thermal Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2006 and 2008, respectively. Prof. Zhao’s research program is supported by NSF CISE, the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund, NASA, NSF C-BET, AFOSR, and ONR. She has also been actively working with industrial partners such as FM Global and Raytheon Technologies Research Center. Prof. Zhao is the recipient of the AFOSR YIP award, NSF CAREER award, and Combustion institute’s Irvin Glassman Young Investigator award. Her research interest includes detailed radiation modeling for multiphase combustion systems, turbulent combustion modelling, the interplay between experiments and computation, as well as high-performance computing. 

Computational fluid dynamics and heat transfer has been advanced since the second half of the 20th century, in parallel to computer hardware evolution, offering simulation tools for modern thermal and fluids engineering design. Nevertheless, classical analytical approaches for partial differential equations remained in use, along this same period, due to benchmarking and preliminary conceptual design needs. Analytical methods offer evident advantages in precision, robustness, and computational speed, but are very restricted by the complexity of the mathematical formulations. To narrow this gap, hybrid numerical-analytical methodologies have been proposed along the way to benefit from both the accuracy and robustness of an analytic-based solution path and the flexibility of numerical methods. One such hybrid approach is the so called Generalized Integral Transform Technique (GITT), which is a generalization of the classical integral transform method. The immediate gain was the expansion of the benchmarks database for the verification of numerical codes and the expansion on the classes of problems that can be dealt with in preliminary design. However, the GITT was progressively extended for about forty years, leading to a widely applicable computational-analytical approach that deals with nonlinear formulations, irregular domains, heterogeneous media, coupled problems, moving boundaries, boundary layer and Navier-Stokes equations. Also, in CPU-intensive simulations that require numerous evaluations of a partial differential system solution, which may include optimization, inverse problem analysis, simulation under uncertainty, and physically informed neural networks, the analytic nature behind the hybrid methodology leads to more evident advantages. The GITT is here reviewed and illustrated, emphasizing recent methodological developments, for two selected transport phenomena forward-inverse problem solutions.

Prof. Renato M. Cotta was born in Niterói, Brazil, on March 5th, 1960. He obtained his B.Sc. in Mechanical-Nuclear Engineering, at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, UFRJ, Brazil, in 1981, and his PhD in Mechanical-Aerospace Eng. from North Carolina State Univ., NCSU, USA, in 1985. He became Assistant Professor at the Aeronautics Technological Institute, ITA, Brazil, 1985-1987, then Associate Prof., at UFRJ, in 1987, and Professor, at COPPE-UFRJ in 1994, and at POLI-UFRJ in 1997, until the present. Author of around 600 articles, 10 books, and supervisor of 49 MSc, 39 PhD, and 18 PosDocs. He is member of 15 Editorial Boards, including Int. J. Heat & Mass Transfer, Int. Comm. Heat & Mass Transfer, Int. J. Thermal Sciences, and Editor of the Annals Braz. Academy of Sciences. Served as President of the Braz. Association of Mechanical Sciences & Engineering, ABCM, from 2000-2001, as member of the Scientific Council, International Centre for Heat & Mass Transfer, ICHMT, since 1993, of the Executive Comm. ICHMT, 2006-2022, ICHMT EC Chairman, 2017-2018, and Congress Comm., Int. Union of Theoretical & Applied Mechanics, IUTAM, 2012-2018. Served as Exec. Director for the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, 2012-2015. He received the ICHMT Hartnett-Irvine Award, 2009 and 2015, the ICHMT Fellowship Award, 2019, the National Order of Scientific Merit, Brazil, in 2009 (Comendador) and 2018 (Grã-Cruz), and the National Order of Naval Merit, Brazil, 2018. He was awarded the prestigious Luikov Medal of the ICHMT, 2022. Member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, since 2009, National Engineering Academy, since 2011, and The World Academy of Sciences, TWAS, since 2012. Holds the Doctor Honoris Causa title from Université de Reims, URCA, France, 2018. President of the National Commission of Nuclear Energy, CNEN, both regulatory body and science promoter in nuclear energy in Brazil, 2015-2017. Adjunct Professor at the University of Miami, 1993-2005, and Leverhulme Trust Visiting Prof. at Univ. College London, UCL, UK. Member of the National Council of Energy Policy, CNPE, Ministry of Mines and Energy, Brazil, 2020-2022. Member of Technical Working Group (TWG) in Nuclear Desalination, IAEA, 2021-2024. Since 2017, Senior Technical Consultant (Amazul Defense Tecnologies), in Nuclear and Technological Development, for the Brazilian Navy.

Computational fluid mechanics produces high-dimensional discretizations of thermal fluid systems. The use of these computationally expensive simulations in uncertainty quantification, control, design and long-time evolution is often prohibitive. In this talk, we first present data-driven reduced-order modeling as a class of methods to approximate high-dimensional dynamical systems with low-dimensional systems, often characterized by the dynamically relevant solution spaces. In particular, we will discuss the operator inference framework and illustrate how one can learn reduced-order models non-intrusively from high-dimensional data, and how additional knowledge—which is often present about fluid dynamical and other mechanical systems—can be embedded as constraints for the resulting optimization problem. We also present several extensions that focus on preserving interesting structures in the dynamics, such as symmetries, conservation principles, symplecticity.  We will illustrate the results on a 2d rocket combustion application as well as some energy-preserving systems where we leverage the Hamiltonian structure in the model learning framework. This guarantees that the learned models are long-term stable and energy-conserving. Several fluid flows are shown as example applications

Boris Kramer is an Assistant Professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California San Diego. Prior to joining UC San Diego, he spent four years as a Postdoctoral Associate in the department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Aerospace Computational Design Lab (ACDL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He received his M.Sc. (2011) and Ph.D. (2015) in Mathematics from Virginia Tech. Prior to that, he studied Mathematics in Technology and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Karlsruhe (now KIT), Germany. He is a member of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), and a Senior Member of AIAA where he also serves on the Multidisciplinary Design Optimization and Nondeterministic Approaches Technical Committees. He is a 2022 NSF CAREER Awardee and won a DoD Newton Award in 2020. His research is funded by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the National Science Foundation. His research interests are to develop computational methods and numerical analysis for control, optimization, design and uncertainty quantification of complex and large-scale systems.

Exploring biofilms in three dimensions in porous media is a long-standing challenge. X-ray tomography allows for visualization of a variety of porous materials and associated processes, but because of the absence of a significant photon cross-section for biofilms (it rather closely resembles the aqueous phase in porous media), getting at the three-dimensional architecture of biofilms in porous media is challenging. However, by innovative use of contrast agents, it is possible to separate the biofilm from porous medium and aqueous phase, and to make a variety of quantitative measurements in support of the overall objective of better understanding of biofilm growth and function. This allows for applications in a variety of fields such as groundwater remediation, microbial fuel cells, enhanced oil recovery, clogging of trickling filters, and fouling of medical implants.  

In this work, we use micro-imaging to study the effects of flow rate on three-dimensional growth of biofilm in porous media. The images allow us to gain a better understanding of how biofilms grow and interact with the pore geometry, nutrients, and the fluid flow environment in the subsurface. In this particular study, three flow rates were applied to evolving biofilms, and observed after a growth period of 11 days. At the end of the growth period, all columns were scanned using x-ray computed microtomography and a barium sulfate-based contrast agent to distinguish the biofilm. Reduction in permeability due to biofilm growth was studied using both transducer-based pressure drop measurements and image-based calculations. 

A combination of results from these different measurements suggest that biofilm growth was oxygen limited at the lowest flow rate, and affected by shear stresses at the highest flow rate. We hypothesize that the interplay between these two factors drives the spatial distribution and quantity of biofilm growth in the class of porous media studied here. Our approach opens the way to more systematic studies of the structure-function relationships involved in biofilm growth in porous media.

Dr. Wildenschild is a Professor of Environmental Engineering in the School of Chemical, Biological, and Environmental Engineering at Oregon State University, and the Jon and Stephanie DeVaan Chair and Executive Director for Clean Water Initiatives at OSU.

Her research focuses on flow and transport in porous media, with the goal of answering questions of relevance to subsurface water pollution and energy-related storage challenges. Recent work includes optimization of geologic storage of anthropogenic carbon dioxide; colloid-facilitated transport of contaminants in groundwater; exploration of biofilms in porous media using high-resolution 3D imaging, and fundamental investigations in support of more effective groundwater remediation techniques. She is the recipient of the 2023 Interpore Society’s Honorary Lifetime Award, and was the 2014 Henry Darcy Distinguished Lecturer in Groundwater Science

Boiling, cavitation, droplet condensation and freezing are basic phase change phenomena.  Performance enhancements and energy efficiency can be achieved with surface modification for these phase change phenomena.  As a result, many surface modification techniques have been proposed and investigated in the literature. One of the most promising approaches include the use of modified surfaces with mixed wettability along the surface, which are capable of manipulating the phase change phenomena and pay way to energy and biomedical applications.  The optimization efforts for various modified surfaces in boiling, cavitation, dropwise condensation and freezing could be made so that with the optimum configurations of surfaces with mixed wettability depending on the application and phase change phenomenon it will then be possible to have significant energy saving and efficiency in thermal-fluids systems involving phase change.  In this talk, research efforts and recent developments in this field will be discussed.  

The second part of the talk will focus on an effective and practical method for having the same effect of modified surfaces with surface enhancements via next generation bio-coatings based on hyperthermophilic archaea and antifreeze proteins, which are durable, environmentally friendly, inexpensive, have unique structures and offer surface modification without the use of any cleanroom fabrication techniques.  The results of fundamental studies on these surfaces will be presented for boiling, dropwise condensation and freezing. 

Ali Koşar is a Distinguished Research Professor at Sabanci University.   He earned his master's and doctoral degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.  He is focusing on the design and development of new generation micro heat sinks with functional surfaces and microfluidic devices including cavitation on chip devices. His research interests constitute a spectrum covering heat and fluid flow in micro/nano scale, condensation, boiling heat transfer, microfluidic systems, freezing and cavitation. He co-authored over 170 research articles in top journals and 80 conference papers in prestigious international conferences. He has also a co-inventor on 8 granted patents and 10 pending patent applications. He received numerous national and international honors, including the µFIP Prominent Researcher Award" in the 2021 micro Flow and Interfacial Phenomena (µFIP) Conference, METU (Middle East Technical University) Prof. Mustafa N. Parlar Foundation Science Award (2021).  He is currently leading a large research group consisting of members from various disciplines, graduate students and engineers and to bridge different disciplines (Energy, Nanotechnology, Applied Physics, Bioengineering, Biochemistry, Mechanical Engineering). He has been successful to secure funding for his research activities from a wide variety of national and international resources.  He also serves as a Subject Editor in the Applied Thermal Engineering journal. He is the Co-director of Center of Excellence for Functional Surfaces and Interfaces for Nano diagnostics (EFSUN) and a Distinguished Researcher of Sabanci University Nanotechnology and Application Center and is  a Member of Turkish Academy of Sciences (TÜBA).

Thermochemical storage systems can enable high energy density, long duration storage at temperatures spanning from building space heating to utility scale power generation. Significant effort has been focused on the development of new material systems. However, there has been less attention on the practical system- and component-level issues of integrating these materials into energy storage technologies. Thus, the objective of this talk is to present research on the thermal engineering challenges of implementing these materials in energy storage systems. We will focus on (1) the use of redox-active metal oxide particles for enabling high temperature thermal storage coupled to closed power cycles, and (2) the use of salt hydrate materials in closed and open systems for providing thermal storage and thermal amplification when integrated with heat pump systems. Our initial results show opportunity for the collaborative co-design and optimization of thermochemical energy storage technology from the material to system scale to maximize efficiency and minimize costs.

Dr. Brian Fronk is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University. From 2014-2022 he was an Assistant and then Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Oregon State University.  He received his Ph.D. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and his B.S. from the Pennsylvania State University. 

His research interests include solar thermal power generation and chemical processing, energy storage, building energy systems, application of advanced manufacturing to novel heat and mass transfer devices, and the experimental investigation of multiphase and supercritical heat transfer. He has held a prior position at Carrier Corp., where he worked in the areas of CO2 compression and transport refrigeration. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award, the 2017 ASHRAE New Investigator Award, and the Oregon State University International Service Award.  He is a registered professional engineer in the State of Oregon.

Impacts from wildland fires have seemingly only increased as wildfires now routinely make headlines, pump smoke across the continent, and burn more structures and area every year.  This talk will begin by introducing the causes of the current “wildfire problem” in the U.S.: the growth of the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI), climate change, and the more than one hundred years of fire exclusion from the landscape.  Our history of wildland fire relates to both the cause and the cure for the current “wildfire problem”.  The path forward requires accepting that wildland fires will, and should, happen, but it needs to be the right kind of fire under the right conditions.  Unfortunately, fundamental understanding of the processes controlling wildland fire behavior is lacking and this limits our ability to safely train our firefighters, predict fire behavior, and understand how to mitigate its effects.  An overview of the current work at the Missoula Fire Sciences Lab to address this lack of understanding will be given, highlighting the important role of thermal and fluid dynamics in wildfire behavior.  However, much more work needs to be done before we have confidence in our prediction capabilities and be able to reduce the impact of wildland fire on our communities.  The talk will conclude with a discussion of these outstanding research needs.

Sara McAllister earned her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering in 2008 from the University of California, Berkeley.  Her Ph.D. dissertation, sponsored by NASA, focused on material flammability in spacecraft.  Since 2009, she has been a Research Mechanical Engineer with the U.S. Forest Service at the Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory in Missoula, Montana.  As part of the National Fire Decision Support Center, Sara’s research focuses on the fundamental governing mechanisms of wildland fire spread.  Specifically, her research includes understanding the critical conditions for solid fuel ignition, flammability of live forest fuels, ignition due to convective heating, and fuel bed property effects on burning rate. She has authored two textbooks, one on combustion fundamentals and one on wildland fire behavior, as well as over 80 peer-reviewed publications and conference papers.  In her spare time, Sara enjoys cycling, running, and racing in triathlons.

Our technology addresses a vital national security need by producing Li salts from domestic sources with a cost-effective and environmentally benign containerized process. It displaces the environmentally damaging solar evaporation ponds used today. We project that our technology will reduce the cost of Li2CO3 by over 80% compared with today’s spot market price and by almost half compared with today’s production cost. In addition to this cost reduction, our transformational impact is in turning U.S. brine deposits into valuable resources for environmentally benign Li production, thereby enhancing our national energy security in an era marked by rapid electrification of the transportation sector and grid scale electricity storage.

Dr. Bahman Abbasi is Founder of Espiku Inc. and an Associate Professor of Mechanical and Energy Systems Engineering at Oregon State University. His research is supported by over $8.5M in external funding  from US DOE, US DOD, State of Oregon, and the private sector.

His research spans water desalination, wastewater treatment, extraction of minerals from brine, low-grade heat recovery, transport phenomena, and application of machine learning in thermal-fluid processes.

Humans have dreamt of robot helpers forever. What's new is that this dream is about to become real. There is not a single silver bullet that is enabling this development; it's a broad array of new actuation, sensors, control algorithms, and a regulatory environment focused on enabling safe deployments. This talk will share an overview of modern control concepts generally described under the umbrella of Artificial Intelligence, and considerations beyond the technical aspects, including human-robot interaction and safety.

Jonathan W. Hurst is Chief Robot Officer and co-founder of Agility Robotics, and Professor and co-founder of the Oregon State University Robotics Institute. He holds a B.S. in mechanical engineering and an M.S. and Ph.D. in robotics, all from Carnegie Mellon University. Throughout his career, his research has focused on understanding the fundamental science and engineering best practices for robotic legged locomotion and physical interaction. At OSU, he led the team that developed ATRIAS, the first robot to reproduce human walking gait dynamics, and Cassie, which holds the world record for the fastest 100 meter dash by a bipedal robot. Working with the excellent engineering team at Agility Robotics, Jonathan is building upon this R&D foundation to develop human-centric, multi-purpose robots such as Digit, the first commercially available bipedal robot made for real-world logistics work. Jonathan spends every day working to realize his lifelong vision of robots going where people.

With growing need for sustainable carbon neutral liquid fuels, low-grade feedstocks such as lignocellulosic biomass, and municipal solid wastes offer sufficient potential via thermochemical conversion. The existing thermochemical conversion offer limited feed flexibility, and scalability, and require significant processing (energy and costs) of the intermediates. Bio-oil/biocrude intermediate from fast-pyrolysis and hydrothermal techniques is impeded with issues of stability and oxygen content, along with hydrotreating viability. A novel pathway will be presented of near-critical CO2-assisted integrated liquefaction-extraction (NILE) technology for conversion of various biomass and municipal solid wastes into high-quality biocrude with high compatibility for co-hydrotreating with traditional fossil crude for liquid fuel needs in power and transportation sectors. Using supercritical CO2 for dewatering of wet feedstocks, and for liquefaction and extraction of lighter biocrude has produced biocrude with lower oxygen content (by 50%), lowered metal content (by 90%), and good stable viscosity, low acidity, and good aging stability compared to that produced from hydrothermal liquefaction along with higher hydrotreating and co-hydrotreating compatibility.

Professor Ashwani K. Gupta has been a faculty member in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Maryland, College Park since 1983, following six years at MIT as a member of the research staff in the Energy Laboratory and Department of Chemical Engineering, and three years at Sheffield University as an independent research worker and research fellow in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Fuel Technology.  He has 45+ years of experience in Combustion engineering since his graduation from Southampton University in 1970, and is the author of over 825 technical papers, three books, 18 edited books, and 19 book chapters. In 2023, Gupta was elected to Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng).  In 2020, he was elected to Honrary Fellowship of the Royal Aeronautical Society (RAeS), UK, the highest professional recognition bestowed by the RAeS.  He is currently Honorary Fellow of American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and Fellow of American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics AIAA), Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and Member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts (EASA). In 2022, Gupta was included in the top 2% of the scientists in the world  by Stanford University which includes the researchers who receive the most citations across all academic fields.

Climate change is real and electronics cooling can help.  High GWP and ODP coolants were slated to handle the energy densities of future electronics, but it is imperative that we limit and/or phase out these chemicals to protect our environment for future generations.  Thermal resistance is a fundamental thermodynamic irreversibility, and it is incumbent on the thermal management community to exploit new breakthroughs in manufacturing, energy systems, and chemistry to minimize these resource-robbing thermal resistances in order to be good stewards of the precious and dwindling energy sources we have here on Earth.  In this talk, we will highlight the work that the Enhanced Heat Transfer Laboratory (EHTL) at Oregon State University (OSU) and others are doing on these fronts in order to effectively and efficiently design for high heat flux electronics components that are slated for the coming years.  Performance augmenting features only made possible through additive manufacturing will feature prominently in the talk.  Performance and design considerations of replacement coolants for the PFAS family of fluids currently under scrutiny will be discussed.  While there is no single solution to this problem for any specific geographic region, there is a holistic portfolio of solutions that can be constructed from current technology that can make an impact now.  Those possibilities will be highlighted throughout the work presented in this talk.

Joshua Gess's research interests lie in the advancement of thermal management solutions for near and far-term high performance microelectronic equipment. To accomplish this, we must look at new ways to model and experimentally capture the characteristics of single and two-phase heat transfer occurring on the macro-scale with passive and active liquid immersion techniques as well as on the micro and nano scale for more complex embedded thermal management solutions. Using fundamental knowledge of heat transfer along with novel experimental methods such as two-phase PIV and high-speed image capture, predictive methods can be used to ensure that reliable and energy efficient thermal management solutions are applied to tomorrow’s demanding electronics systems.

At Oregon State since 2015.

A parallel-plate channel filled partially with a high permeability metal foam and a single round jet impinging on the foam is investigated numerically. The opposite wall to the air round jet is partially heated at uniform heat flux. The fluid flow in the channel is assumed two dimensional and the porous medium is modeled using the Brinkman–Forchheimer-extended Darcy model. The structure of the porous medium is homogenous and isotropic, the thermophysical properties of the air and the porous medium are temperature independent, and the fluid flow is steady state, laminar and incompressible. The analysis in the porous medium is accomplished under local thermal equilibrium conditions and a two-dimensional numerical axial symmetric model is developed to evaluate the hydrodynamic and heat transfer characteristics within the channel. The problem is solved employing the Ansys-Fluent code. The analysis is accomplished for different ratio between the heated plate distance from the jet exit section and metal foam thickness for different Reynolds jet numbers, and wall heat flux. Results in terms of stream function and fluid and solid matrix temperature fields, wall temperature profiles, air velocity and temperature as well as solid profiles along the transversal section of porous medium are given in the Peclet number range from 1 to 1000 and four Rayleigh number values are examined, from 10 to 1000. Nusselt numbers and pressure drops are estimated. Results indicate that for the channel with a porous medium thickness equal to the channel gap the highest Nusselt number is detected.

Oronzio Manca currently works at the Dipartimento di Ingegneria, Università degli Studi della Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli". Oronzio does research in Engineering Education and Mechanical Engineering. Their current project is 'Nanouptake_ COST action'. Skills and Expertise: Computational Fluid Dynamics, Engineering Thermodynamics, Numerical Simulation, Numerical Modeling, Aerodynamics, Numerical Analysis, Fluid Mechanics, CFD Simulation, Thermal Engineering, Modeling and Simulation