Affiliation:
Purdue University
Position:
Associate Head for Faculty Affairs, and Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Title of the talk: Comming soon
Bio: Arezoo Ardekani is Associate Head for Faculty Affairs and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University. Her research integrates fluid mechanics, complex fluids, soft matter, and transport phenomena to uncover the fundamental physics governing biological systems and particulate suspensions. Her work has established predictive computational frameworks that connect microscale physics with macroscopic transport, enabling advances in drug delivery, biopharmaceutical manufacturing, and multiphase flows.
Ardekani is a Fellow of AAAS, APS, AIMBE, and ASME. She received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the NSF CAREER Award, the Arthur B. Metzner Early Career Award from the Society of Rheology, the Society of Engineering Science Young Investigator Medal, the Sigma Xi Mid-Career Research Award, and was inducted into the University of California, Irvine Engineering Hall of Fame. She has published more than 200 journal articles, secured over $115 million in competitive research funding as PI or co-I, and mentored eighty graduate students and postdoctoral scholars; several now hold faculty and research leadership positions.
Beyond her research, Ardekani is an internationally recognized scientific leader. She serves as Associate Editor of Physical Review Fluids and previously served as Associate Editor of ASME Applied Mechanics Reviews. She served on the advisory boards of Physics of Fluids and the Journal of Non-Newtonian Fluid Mechanics. She co-chaired the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics Annual Meeting held in Indianapolis and has served on numerous national award committees and professional society leadership boards. She has been a member-at-large of the executive committee for the American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics and a governing board member of the International Conference on Multiphase Flows. She is currently serving as the member-at-large of the executive committee of the society of rheology and is the co-chair of the technical committee for the 2026 society of rheology annual meeting.
Affiliation:
Indian Institute of Technology Madras
Position:
Institute Professor
V. Balakrishnan Chair Professor
JC Bose Awardee
Heat Transfer & Thermal Power Laboratory
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Title of the talk: Deep Eutectic Solvent (DES) Based Nano-Coolants as an Environment Friendly Option for Dielectric Cooling Duties
Abstract: The rapid advancement of high-performance electronics and electric vehicles demands dielectric coolants capable of dissipating extreme heat fluxes while maintaining electrical insulation integrity and environmental damage to the minimum. Yet conventional fluorocarbon-based coolants carry severe environmental penalties such as high global warming potential, ozone depletion, and long atmospheric hazards driving the urgent need for sustainable alternatives. Deep Eutectic Solvents (DESs) are ionic liquids, composed of biodegradable hydrogen bond acceptors and donors forming eutectic mixtures with melting points significantly lower than individual components, address this challenge. Our formulation of diphenyl ether and dibenzyl ether (1:0.63 molar ratio) creates a liquid with zero GWP, complete biodegradability, and low ozone-depleting potential, while the extended hydrogen bonding network imparts a wide liquid-phase operating range (-12°C to 180°C), preventing phase separation and dielectric breakdown under high-heat-flux conditions typical of semiconductor chip cooling (50–200 kW/m2) and electric vehicles (0.8 to 1 kW/m2). Dispersion of hexagonal Boron Nitride (hBN) nanoparticles (60 nm) creates thermal percolation networks that, through Brownian motion, thermophoresis, etc. enhance effective thermal conductivity by 5.2% and specific heat capacity by 38%, enabling the nano-coolant to remove 15% more heat per unit volume compared to the base DES. The dielectric constant of 2–3 is ideal for direct contact cooling of semiconductor chips and battery cells, minimizing parasitic capacitance and leakage currents unlike water (εr ≈ 80) or polar solvents, while the absence of free ions ensures electrical insulation even under high electric fields. Thus, DES-based nano-coolants offer a sustainable, high-performance solution for dielectric cooling duties across electronics and electric vehicles, aligned with SDGs 7, 12, and 13, without compromising thermal or dielectric performance, while the finite element method-based conjugate heat transfer model validated against experiments provides a robust computational framework for predicting and optimizing this eco-friendly cooling technology. This lecture explores the application of the DES based nano-coolant in two different fields, namely the cooling of Li-ion battery stack with cylindrical batteries and use of the coolant in the heat sink for plasma etching of silicone wafer for the fabrication of electronics devices. The work examines both experimental and computational methods to explore the possibilities of usage of this novel fluid as a future environment-friendly coolant.
Bio: Professor Sarit K. Das is an Institute Professor and the first V. Balakrishnan Chair Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai. He is the former Director(President) of the Indian Institute of Technology Ropar and the former Dean (Academic Research) of IIT Madras. Prof. Das studied at the Jadavpur University, NIT Rourkela and the Helmut Schmidt University of Hamburg, Germany. His research group works on various aspects of thermo fluidics like heat and mass transfer in industrial equipment such as heat exchangers and fuel cells, multiphase flow, water purification and energy conversion. The group focuses explicitly on Micro-Nano scale processes and is known to be one of the leading groups on Nanofluids in the world. Another area of focus of the group is bio-microfluidics, for medical diagnostics, the platform for drug delivery and understanding pathological states related to cardiovascular diseases and cancer. Prof. Das is a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences (NASI), the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE), the Indian National Science Academy (INSA) as well as of Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany. Recently, he has been selected a fellow of the Asian Union of Thermal Sciences and Engineering (AUTSE). He is a JC Bose awardee of the, ANRF India. He was a Peabody Visiting Professor at MIT, Cambridge and a visiting Professor - Lund University, Sweden. He was conferred with the prestigious India Citation Awards 2012 by Thomson Reuters. He has published more than 400 research articles and six books. Prof. Das is a member of the editorial boards of Heat Transfer Engineering, Taylor & Francis Publishers and the former Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Micro-Nano Scale Transport. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award from IIT Madras and the distinguished alumnus award of NIT Rourkela.
Affiliation:
Villanova University
Position:
William M. Brown Endowed Chair Professor in Mechanical Engineering
Senior Associate Dean for Research and Innovation, Villanova University
Editor-in-Chief of Energy Conversion and Management
Title of the talk: Comming soon
Bio: A globally renowned authority in thermal engineering, Sylvie Lorente, PhD, has the distinction of being among the top 2 percent of most-cited scientists worldwide. A sought-after scholar and speaker, she has earned numerous international accolades, including her appointment in 2022 to the governing body of the European Research Council by the European Commission and her election in 2019 to the prestigious Academia Europaea—an association of European scientists and scholars whose members include 80 Nobel laureates.
Affiliation:
The Ohio State University
Position:
Professor, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Title of the talk: Comming soon
Bio: Dr. Mazumder is a Professor and Associate Chair of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at The Ohio State University (OSU). He received his B.Tech. in Mechanical Engineering from IIT-Kharagpur in 1991 and his Ph.D. from Penn State University in 1997. He joined The Ohio State University (OSU) in March of 2004. Prior to joining OSU, he was employed at CFD Research Corporation in Huntsville, AL for 7 years. Dr. Mazumder is the author of two graduate-level textbooks and more than 140 peer-reviewed papers. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Notable among his many awards are the Moran award and the Distinguished Graduate Faculty award from the OSU Mechanical and Aerospace Department, and the McCarthy award for teaching and the Lumley award for research from the OSU College of Engineering. In 2024, he received the U.S. Fulbright-Kalam Climate Science award.
Affiliation:
Stanford University
Position:
Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Program Director of the Center for Turbulence Research (CTR)
Title of the talk: Comming soon
Bio: Beverley McKeon is Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Program Director of the Center for Turbulence Research (CTR) at Stanford University. She was formerly the Theodore von Karman Professor of Aeronautics at the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories at Caltech (GALCIT) with a courtesy appointment in Computational and Mathematical Sciences, and Deputy Chair of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science.
McKeon’s research interests include interdisciplinary, equation- and data-driven approaches to modeling and manipulation of unsteady and turbulent flows across a range of Mach number, fundamental experimental investigations of wall turbulence under engineering-relevant conditions, and innovative experiments to characterize and modify unsteady and turbulent flows. Best known for her work pioneering resolvent analysis as an equation-driven tool to analyze and predict the dynamics of turbulent flow, her research group has specialized in addressing its application to understand and modify wall turbulence in numerical data and via experiments with external forcing.
Her work has been recognized through a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship from the DoD in 2017, a Presidential Early Career Award (PECASE) in 2009 and an NSF CAREER Award in 2008.
She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and currently serves as co-Lead Editor of Phys. Rev. Fluids, on the editorial board of the Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics and on the Annual Reviews Editorial Affairs Committee. She is a Past Chair of the US National Committee on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics and co-chaired the Panel on Physical Science, NAS Decadal Survey on Biological and Physical Sciences Research in Space, 2023-2032.
McKeon received M.A. and M.Eng. degrees from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University.
Affiliation:
Charles Ringrose Assistant Professor, College of Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Title of the talk: Coming soon
Bio: Dr. Wagner is principal investigator of the Energy Systems Operations Lab, a faculty member of the Solar Energy Lab, and a faculty affiliate of the Wisconsin Electric Machines and Power Electronics Consortium. His research includes thermal systems modeling, system design and operations optimization, and predictive performance analysis of energy generation and storage technologies. Prior to joining UW-Madison, he was a senior researcher and principal investigator for over 11 years in the Thermal Systems group at the National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colorado. Dr. Wagner is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison (B.S., M.S.) and Colorado School of Mines (Ph.D.).