Seminars

Droplet Impingement and its Application in Electronic Cooling

Mahsa Ebrahim

Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Loyola Marymount University
Los Angeles, CA

The need for cooling of high heat flux electronics is dramatically increasing as the technology developments make the electronic devices more compact and more powerful. Spray cooling is known to be one of the most effective methods of cooling high heat flux applications. However, common issues of dry-out and excessive liquid accumulation make spray cooling an unreliable technique for the cooling of high heat flux electronics. In order to better understand the fundamental physics and heat absorption of spray cooling, single droplet impingement on a heated surface has gained numerous attention. Although extensive research has been performed on single droplet impingement, the literature is sparse regarding the study of the heat transfer at high impact velocities and at micrometer size scale. Upon the impact of the droplet, the surface temperature drops dramatically and rapidly and at higher impact conditions this temperature drop is even more severe. In this work, the hydrodynamic and heat transfer regimes of a single droplet at high impact conditions were identified and mapped. Techniques were developed to enhance the heat absorption and the evaporation rate of each droplet by utilizing an impinging air flow to increase the impact velocity and to control the hydrodynamic phases after the impact and therefore to promote the utilization of spray cooling in high heat flux electronics.

Mahsa Ebrahim is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Loyola Marymount University. She received her Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Villanova University and her M.S. and B.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from K.N.Toosi University of Technology in Iran. She spent a year of her Ph.D. at the University of Leeds in England as a research scholar. Her research focuses on numerical and experimental thermal-fluid science, spray cooling and droplet impingement, interfacial flows and phase interactions with applications in electronic cooling. She has been an active organizer of the IEEE-ITherm conferences since 2018.

Wednesday, August 26, 2020
3:30 PM
The Zoom webinar is at https://usc.zoom.us/j/95959519165.

host: Sadhal

Research Collaboration with AME Part Time Faculty

Marty Bradley

Senior Technical Fellow
Electra.aero
Falls Church, VA

Marty Bradley invites some of his fellow part time lecturers to discuss collaboration opportunities between their commercial employers and research groups within AME. Marty, Kamal Shweyk, David Lazzara, and Hubert Wong will discuss possible collaboration topics including electric aircraft; alternative fuels – Hydrogen, etc.; environmental analysis; supersonic aerodynamics; design optimization; flight controls; and UAV dynamic requirements.

Marty Bradley is a retired Technical Fellow from Boeing (June 2020) and is now a Senior Technical Fellow for Electra.aero working on a small short takeoff hybrid electric aircraft. He has 36 years of aerospace experience, and is a Part Time Lecturer at USC, teaching AME-481 Aircraft Design. He has a B.S., M.S., E.A.E., and Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering, all from USC.

Wednesday, September 2, 2020
3:30 PM
The Zoom webinar is at https://usc.zoom.us/j/95556139831.

host: Ronney

Prediction of Real-World External Aerodynamics Using Numerical Simulations

Adrian Lozano-Duran

Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Center for Turbulence Research
Stanford University
Stanford, CA

The use of computational fluid dynamics for external aerodynamic applications has been a key tool for aircraft design in the modern aerospace industry. In the last decades, large-eddy simulation with near-wall modeling (wall-modeled LES) has gained momentum as a cost-effective approach for both scientific research and industrial applications. In this talk, we discuss current challenges of wall-modeled LES to become a design tool for the aerospace industry. Our focus is on the working principles and performance of wall-modeled LES for external aerodynamic applications, with emphasis on realistic commercial aircrafts. We examine the computational cost to predict mean flow features and forces for a given degree of accuracy using theory and numerical simulations of the NASA Juncture Flow and the JAXA Standard Model. The vision presented here is motivated by discussions in previous AIAA workshops and the experience acquired at the Center for Turbulence Research during the last years.

Adrian Lozano-Duran is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Turbulence Research at Stanford University hosted by Prof. Moin. He received his PhD in Aerospace Engineering from the Technical University of Madrid in 2015 at the Fluid Mechanics Lab. advised by Prof. Jiménez. The overarching theme of his research is physics and modeling of wall-bounded turbulence via theory and computational fluid mechanics. His work covers a wide range of topics, such as turbulence theory and modeling by machine learning, large-eddy simulation for external aerodynamics, geophysical and multiphase flows, among others.

Wednesday, September 9, 2020
3:30 PM
The Zoom webinar is at https://usc.zoom.us/j/99375525323

host: Bermejo-Moreno

Robotics Meets Physics

Daniel Goldman

Dunn Family Professor Professor
School of Physics
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, Georgia

Robots will soon move from the factory floor and into our lives (e.g. autonomous cars, package delivery drones, and search-and-rescue devices). However, compared to living systems, robot capabilities in complex environments are limited. I believe the mindset and tools of physics can help facilitate the creation of robust self-propelled autonomous systems. This “robophysics” approach – the systematic search for novel dynamics and principles in robotic systems -- can aid the computer science and engineering approaches which have proven successful in less complex environments. The rapidly decreasing cost of constructing sophisticated robot models with easy access to significant computational power bodes well for such interactions. Drawing from examples in the work of my group and our collaborators, I will discuss how robophysical studies have inspired new physics questions in low dimensional dynamical systems (e.g. creation of analog quantum mechanics and gravity systems) and soft matter physics (e.g. emergent capabilities in ensembles of active “particles”), have been useful to develop insight for biological locomotion in complex terrain (e.g. control targets via optimizing geometric phase), and have begun to aid engineers in the creation of devices that begin to achieve life-like locomotor abilities on and within complex environments (e.g. semi-soft myriapod robots).

Daniel I. Goldman is a Dunn Family Professor in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Georgia Power Professor of Excellence. Prof. Goldman became a faculty member at Georgia Tech in January 2007. He is an adjunct member of the School of Biology and is a member of the Interdisciplinary Bioengineering Graduate Program.

Prof. Goldman's research program broadly investigates the interaction of biological and physical systems with complex materials like granular media. In particular, he integrates laboratory experiment, computer simulation, and physical and mathematical models to discover principles of movement of a diversity of animals and robots in controlled laboratory substrates.

He received his S.B. in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994. He received his PhD in Physics in 2002 from the University of Texas at Austin, studying nonlinear dynamics and granular media. From 2003-2007 he did postdoctoral work in the Department of Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley studying locomotion biomechanics.

Prof. Goldman is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (2014), and has received an NSF CAREER/PECASE award, a DARPA Young Faculty Award, a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface, and the UT Austin Outstanding Dissertation in Physics (2002-2003).

Wednesday, September 16, 2020
3:30 PM
The Zoom webinar is at https://usc.zoom.us/j/96536533521

host: Kanso

The Hydrodynamics of Sea Lion Swimming

Megan Leftwich

Associate Professor
School of Engineering & Applied Science
George Washington University
Washington, DC

California Sea Lions are highly maneuverable swimmers, capable of generating high thrust and agile turns. Their main propulsive surfaces, the foreflippers, feature multiple degrees of freedom, allowing their use for thrust production (through a downward, sweeping motion referred to as a “clap”), turning, stability and station holding (underwater “hovering”). To determine the two-dimensional kinematics of the California sea lion fore flipper during thrust generation, digital, high definition video is obtained using the specimen at the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington, DC. Single camera videos are analyzed to digitize the flipper during the motions, using 10 points spanning root to tip in each frame. Digitized shapes were then fitted with an empirical function that quantitatively allows for both comparison between different claps and for extracting kinematic data. The resulting function shows a high degree of curvature (with a camber of up to 32%). Analysis of sea lion acceleration from rest shows thrust production in the range of 150-680 N and maximum flipper angular velocity (for rotation about the shoulder joint) as high as 20 rad/s. Analysis of turning maneuvers indicate extreme agility and precision of movement driven by the fore flipper surfaces. This work is being extended to three-dimensions via the addition of a second camera and a sophisticated calibration scheme to create a set of camera-intrinsic properties. Simultaneously, we have developed a robotic sea lion foreflipper to investigate the resulting fluid dynamic structures in a controlled, laboratory setting.

Megan C. Leftwich is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at The George Washington University. She holds a Ph.D. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University and a B.S.E. degree from Duke University. Prior to joining GW, she was the Agnew National Security Postdoctoral Fellow at Los Alamos National Lab from 2010 to 2012. Her current research interests include the fluid dynamics of rotating airfoils, high performance jetting for aquatic locomotion, unsteady activation for undulatory propulsion, and the fluid dynamics of human birth. Prof. Leftwich has a deep interest in diversity in technical fields and STEM education from the first year through the Ph.D. Professor Leftwich is an Office of Naval Research 2017 Young Investigator Award Recipient. Additionally, she is the winner of the Curriculum Vitae of Megan C. Leftwich 2019 Early Career Researcher Award at George Washington University, the 2018 SEAS Dean’s Faculty Recognition Award, the 2017 SEAS Outstanding Young Researcher Award and the 2016 SEAS Outstanding Young Teacher Award. Her work on unsteady propulsion has been profiled in over 20 popular media venues including: Wired, CNN's Great Big Story, the Smithsonian Magazine and the New York Times.

Wednesday, January 29, 2020
3:30 PM
The Zoom webinar is at https://usc.zoom.us/j/99786894408

host: Kanso/Luhar

Pulmonary Hypertension Assessed Using Mathematical Modeling Integrating Imaging and Time-Series Data

Mette Olufsen

Professor
Department of Mathematics
NC State University
Raleigh, NC

Cardiovascular disease management involves interpreting imaging data, time-series data, and single-valued markers often measured over several visits. While each data type provides insight into the disease state, these snapshots cannot easily be integrated to provide insight into disease predictions. In this talk, we demonstrate how to interpret the disease state using multiscale mathematical modeling integrating computed tomography (CT) images with blood pressure measurements from right heart categorization. We use these models to characterize patient-specific remodeling in the proximal and distal vasculature. We calculate patient-specific nominal parameter values using morphometric and invasively measured hemodynamic data, use sensitivity analysis to determine what parameters best inform the data, and a Bayesian approach to infer identifiable subject-specific parameters and propagate the uncertainty of pressure and flow predictions to all large vessels. We also validate frequency domain results assessing change in wave-propagation and wave-intensity with the disease. For the micro-vasculature, we conduct a morphometric analysis characterizing changes in the arterial networks' branching structure by extracting skeletonized networks from the micro-CT images and using a custom algorithm to represent the network as a connected graph. We determine subject-specific fractal parameters and analyze how these changes with PH. Our model and data analysis outcomes are combined to understand the link between spatially distributed etiologies and global hemodynamics and shed light on the prospect of combining the model and graph-based morphometric analysis of vascular trees.

Dr. Olufsen, Professor, has been associated with the NCSU Mathematics Department since 2001. She got her Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Roskilde University, Denmark in 2001, for which she developed a 1D systemic arterial model for use in an Anesthesia Simulator. After graduating, she spent three years at Boston University, working with Nancy Kopell and Ali Nadim.

At NCSU her main focus has been on developing patient-specific models for understanding the cardiovascular system and its control. Her recent work has focused on using modeling to understand pulmonary hypertension integrating imaging and time-series data. She has mentored more than 20 graduate students (two who are Assistant Professors at USC) and a large number of undergraduate students. She has published more than 100 manuscripts and organized numerous workshops and conferences including SIAM Life Sciences. She served as a scientific advisor for the Mathematical Biosciences Institute at Ohio State and is currently the director for the NCSU Research for Undergraduates Program.

Wednesday, September 30, 2020
3:30 PM
The Zoom webinar is at https://usc.zoom.us/j/96172159326.

host: Sadhal

Tackling Complex Flow Problems via Numerical Simulation: From Jumping Fish and Heart Valves to River Flooding and Wind Energy

Fotis Sotiropolous

Dean, College of Engineering and Applied Sciences
and
State University of New York Distinguished Professor of Civil Engineering
Stony Brook University
Stony Brook, NY

Simulation-based engineering science has emerged as a powerful approach for tackling the major societal problems of our time related to human health, environmental sustainability, and renewable energy. Fluid mechanics problems frequently at the center of many of these challenges are often so complex that simulation-based research is the only viable approach for tackling them. Examples range from disease promoting blood flow patterns in the human heart and bioinspired swimming robots to extreme flooding in waterways and harnessing renewable energy from wind, currents, and waves. Accurate numerical simulation of such flows poses a formidable challenge to even the most advanced computational methods available today. In this talk I will discuss the advances we have made in my group to develop a powerful computational framework, the Virtual Flow Simulator (VFS), which can: handle arbitrarily complex geometries encountered in real-life applications; simulate fluid-structure interaction for rigid and flexible bodies; account for two-phase flows and free surface effects; and carry out coherent-structure-resolving simulations of turbulent flows in arbitrarily complex domains with dynamically evolving boundaries. The ability of the method to yield striking new insights into the physics of a broad range of real-life problems will be demonstrated by discussing applications in aquatic biology, cardiovascular engineering, turbulence and transport processes in natural waterways, and wind and marine and hydrokinetic energy. Future grand challenges and opportunities for simulation-based fluid mechanics research will also be discussed.

Fotis Sotiropoulos serves as Dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences and SUNY Distinguished Professor of Civil Engineering at Stony Brook University. Before joining Stony Brook University, he was the James L. Record Professor of Civil Engineering; Director of the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory; and Director of the EOLOS wind energy research consortium at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (2006-2015). Prior to that, he was on the faculty of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, with a joint appointment in the G. W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering (1995-2005). His research focuses on simulation-based engineering science for tackling complex, societally relevant fluid mechanics problems in energy, environment and human health applications. He has authored over 190 peer reviewed journal papers and book chapters and his research results have been featured on the cover of several prestigious journals. He has been awarded the 2019 American Geophysical Union (AGU) Hydrology Days Borland Lecture in Hydraulics, the 2017 Hunter Rouse Hydraulic Engineering Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), a 2014 distinguished lecturer of the Mortimer and Raymond Sackler Institute of Advanced Studies at Tel Aviv University, and a Career Award from the National Science Foundation. Sotiropoulos is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and has twice won the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics Gallery of Fluid Motion (2009, 2011).

Wednesday, October 7, 2020
3:30 PM
The Zoom webinar is at https://usc.zoom.us/j/93818975375.

host: Pahlevan

Fluid-Structure Interactions within Marine Phenomena

Shilpa Khatri

Assistant Professor
Applied Mathematics Department
School of Natural Sciences
University of California at Merced
Merced, CA

To understand the fluid dynamics of marine phenomena fluid-structure interaction problems must be solved. Challenges exist in developing numerical techniques to solve these complex flow problems with boundary conditions at fluid-structure interfaces. I will present details of two different problems where these challenges are handled: (1) modeling of pulsating soft corals and (2) simulations of crab odor-capture organs. Both of these problems will be motivated by field and experimental work in the marine sciences. I will discuss these related data and provide comparisons with the modeling.

Shilpa Khatri received her Ph.D. in 2009 from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences (NYU). After a postdoctoral position in the Department of Mathematics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she joined the faculty in Applied Mathematics at UC Merced in 2014. The focus of her research is fluid dynamics arising in the context of marine phenomena, such as the transport of nutrients, organisms, and pollutants in the ocean. She designs numerical methods for mathematical models that she develops and analyzes while comparing with experimental data - specifically for fluid-structure interactions and multiphase flows.

Wednesday, October 14, 2020
3:30 PM
The Zoom webinar is at https://usc.zoom.us/j/92600319795.

host: Kanso

Tunable Porous and Patterned Surfaces for Turbulence Control

Mitul Luhar

Department of Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering
USC
Los Angeles, CA

Control of wall-bounded turbulent flows has been an important area of research for several decades. However, the development of effective control techniques has been hindered by the limited availability of computationally tractable models that can guide design and optimization. This talk describes extensions of the resolvent analysis formalism that seek to address this limitation. Under the resolvent formulation, the turbulent velocity field is expressed as a superposition of propagating modes (‘resolvent modes’) identified via a gain-based decomposition of the Navier-Stokes equations. Control is introduced into this framework via changes to the boundary conditions or through additional forcing terms in the governing equations. These changes alter the structure and gain of resolvent modes, whereby a reduction in gain is shown to be indicative of mode suppression and drag reduction. This modeling framework reproduces previous observations for passive control techniques such as sharkskin-inspired riblets, compliant walls, and anisotropic porous materials with minimal computation. Ongoing work builds on these observations to develop optimization routines for riblet shape and to design, fabricate, and test porous materials that can passively control turbulent flows

Mitul Luhar joined the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at USC as Assistant Professor in January 2015 and was appointed as the Henry Salvatori Early Career Chair in 2020. He has received the AFOSR Young Investigator Program award as well as the NSF Career award. Prior to joining USC, Mitul was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories at Caltech. He earned his Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from MIT in 2012, and his B.A. and M.Eng. degrees in Engineering from Cambridge University in 2007.

Wednesday, October 21, 2020
3:30 PM

The Zoom webinar invitation is at https://usc.zoom.us/j/96299159490.

host: Ronney

Systems Biomedicine and Pharmaceutics: Multiscale Modeling of Tissue Remodeling and Damage

Ashlee N. Ford Versypt

Associate Professor
School of Chemical Engineering
Oklahoma State University
Stillwater, OK
and
Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering
University at Buffalo
The State University of New York

Dr. Ford Versypt leads the Systems Biomedicine and Pharmaceutics research lab, which develops and uses multiscale systems engineering approaches including mathematical modeling and computational simulation to enhance understanding of the mechanisms governing tissue remodeling and damage as a result of diseases and infections and to simulate the treatment of those conditions to improve human health. The lab specializes in (a) modeling mass transport of biochemicals through heterogeneous porous materials—primarily extracellular matrices—that change morphology dynamically due to the influence of chemical reactions and (b) modeling dynamic, multi-species biological systems involving chemical, physical, and biological interactions of diverse, heterogeneous cell populations with these materials and the chemical species in tissue microenvironments. In this seminar, vignettes of three lines of research will be highlighted including (1) glucose-stimulated damage to kidney cells during diabetes, (2) metastatic cancer spread, and (3) viral-damage and immune-induced damage in SARS-CoV-2 infected lung tissue. The work is currently supported by an NSF CAREER award and an NIH R35 MIRA grant.

Ashlee N. Ford Versypt leads the Systems Biomedicine and Pharmaceutics Laboratory. The long-term goal for her research program is to develop multiscale mathematical and computational models to enhance understanding of the mechanisms governing tissue remodeling and damage as a result of diseases and infections and to simulate the treatment of those conditions to improve human health. The Systems Biomedicine and Pharmaceutics Laboratory specializes in modeling kinetics and transport processes involved in biological and chemical interactions related to both physiological microenvironments and engineered biomedical and pharmaceutical systems, particularly those involved in tissue damage and treatment. Her research program is funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Additionally, Dr. Ford Versypt also disseminates educational scholarship through publications, presentations, and software related to chemical engineering instruction, computational activities, student development, and outreach.

While earning her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Dr. Ford Versypt was awarded the Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (DOE CSGF) and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. In 2013, Dr. Ford Versypt was recognized as the Frederick A. Howes Scholar in Computational Science, which is awarded annually to a recent alumnus of the DOE CSGF for outstanding leadership, character, and technical achievement. In 2012-2014, Dr. Ford Versypt was a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Ford Versypt is presently a Tenured Associate Professor in the School of Chemical Engineering at Oklahoma State University (OSU) where she has been faculty since 2014. She will relocate to the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York in January 2021.

Dr. Ford Versypt has received a number of awards for her research, teaching, and service including the NSF CAREER Award, ASEE Chemical Engineering Ray W. Fahien Award, ASEE Midwest Section Outstanding Service Award, AIChE 35 Under 35, OSU Outstanding Achievement for the Mentorship of Women, OSU College of Engineering, Architecture and Technology Excellent Teacher Award, and Joseph J. Martin Award for best paper in the ChE Division at the 2014 ASEE Annual Meeting. She is the 2020-2021 Chair of the ASEE Chemical Engineering Division.

Wednesday, October 28, 2020
3:30 PM
The Zoom webinar is at https://usc.zoom.us/j/94175981194.

host: Penkova

Novel High-Performance Numerical Methods for Problems in Solids, Fluids and Their Interactions: Predictions and Insights into the Underlying Physics

Faisal Amlani

Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering
USC
Los Angeles, CA

This talk discusses efforts to study wave-like phenomena in realistic applications through the development of new high-order methodologies for the numerical analysis of the partial differential equations (PDEs) that govern both linear and nonlinear behavior. These techniques include new Fourier-based methods in the time-domain as well as adaptive boundary element methods in frequency-space, where the ultimate goal is to provide fast, stable and physically-faithful resolution of the underlying mechanical dynamics. With an eye towards mutual validation of both simulation and experiment, these tools will be demonstrated through some of the collaborative scientific problems that have inspired them, including those in materials science (ultrasonic non-destructive testing), cardiovascular medicine (hemodynamic waves) and geophysics (supershear ruptures and tsunami generation).

Faisal Amlani received his BA from Rice University and his PhD from Caltech, both in applied mathematics. His doctoral work was awarded the Caltech W.P. Carey Prize and the Caltech Demetriades Prize for the most outstanding dissertation in mathematics and seismo-engineering, respectively. After some years working as an experimentalist and engineer at an R&D aerospace startup in Los Angeles, he returned to academia by way of France through postdocs at Sorbonne University and the Institut Polytechnique de Paris. He is currently a Postdoctoral Scholar-Research Associate in the Department of Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering at USC.

Wednesday, November 4, 2020
3:30 PM
The Zoom webinar invitation is at https://usc.zoom.us/j/98031374607.

host: Sadhal

Asymptotic Nusselt Numbers for Internal Flow in the Cassie State and Their Application to Thermal Management of Electronics

Marc Hodes

Professor
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Tufts University
Medford, MA

We consider laminar, fully-developed, Poiseuille flows of liquid in the Cassie state through diabatic, parallel-plate microchannels symmetrically textured with isoflux ridges. Through the use of matched asymptotic expansions we analytically develop expressions for dimensionless (apparent hydrodynamic) slip lengths and variously-defined Nusselt numbers. Our small parameter (ε) is the pitch of the ridges divided by the height of the microchannel. When the ridges are oriented parallel to the (fully developed) flow, we quantify the error in the Nusselt number expressions in the literature and we provide a new closed-form result. The latter is accurate to O(ε²) and valid for any solid (ridge) fraction, whereas those in the current literature are accurate to O(ε) and break down in the important limit when solid fraction approaches zero. When the ridges are oriented transverse to the (periodically fully-developed) flow, the error associated with neglecting inertial effects to find the slip length is shown to be O(ε³Re) where Re is the channel-scale Reynolds number based on its hydraulic diameter. The corresponding Nusselt number expressions are new and their accuracy is shown to be dependent on Reynolds number, Peclet number and Prandtl number in addition to ε. They're compared to numerical results from the literature. In concluding this talk, we will show how the results can be used to design enhanced liquid-metal cooling solutions for microelectronics.

Marc Hodes earned his BS, MS, and PhD degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Minnesota and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, respectively. He spent 10 years at Bell Labs Research (Murray Hill, NJ) and has spent extended periods in residence at the National Institute of Standards and Technologies (NIST), the University of Limerick and Imperial College London. He joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Tufts University in 2008 where he is a Professor and the Director of Graduate Studies. His Groups’ research there has been funded by government agencies, e.g., NSF, DARPA and DoE, and industry, e.g., Huawei and Google. Research interests are in Transport Phenomena and, over the course of his career, four thematic areas have been addressed: 1) the thermal management of electronics, 2) mass transfer in supercritical fluids, 3) analysis of thermoelectric modules, and 4) momentum, heat, mass and charge transport in the presence of apparent slip. Professor Hodes is the sole- or co-author of 50 papers in archival journals on these subjects. He is also a co-inventor on 15 issued US patents. His current research lies in three areas. First, analytical solutions for Poiseuille and Nusselt numbers for liquid flows over diabatic structured surfaces that capture, e.g., the effects of curvature, thermocapillary stress and/or evaporation and condensation along menisci, are being developed. This thread is in the context of the Red Lotus Project, a collaboration with applied mathematicians at Imperial College London. Secondly, a series of experiments to measure densities, molecular and Soret diffusion coefficients and mass transfer rates in alcohol-carbon dioxide solutions at supercritical conditions relevant to the drying of aerogels are being conducted. Thirdly, a numerical method for the optimization of heat sinks is under development. The latter was recently spun out of Tufts University as a software product by a start-up company, Transport Phenomena Technologies, LLC, co-founded by Professor Hodes, per NSF SBIR funding.

Wednesday, November 11, 2020
3:30 PM
The Zoom webinar invitation is at https://usc.zoom.us/j/94808927541.

host: Sadhal