MechE Inaugural Lecture: Leverage Liquid-Vapor Phase Change for High-Performance Sustainable Cooling
Event details
| Date | 26.09.2023 |
| Hour | 12:00 › 13:00 |
| Speaker | Prof. Zhengmao Lu, Energy Transport Advances Laboratory (ETA-Lab), Institute of Mechanical Engineering (IGM), School of Engineering (STI), EPFL |
| Location | Online |
| Category | Inaugural lectures - Honorary Lecture |
| Event Language | English |
Abstract: Fundamental understanding of phase change phenomena, despite its great impact on the world’s energy and water systems, has been limited, mainly due to the difficulty of experimentally isolating and characterizing interfacial thermal resistance. In the first part of my talk, I will discuss how we overcame this challenge and elucidated a unified relationship for evaporative transport under different working conditions. In the second part of my talk, I will discuss how we leveraged the obtained understanding to create high-performance passive cooling solutions. For thermal management of electronics, we created a membrane-based hierarchical evaporator and demonstrated a record high pure evaporation heat flux for dielectric fluids. For temperature regulation of buildings and perishable goods, our hydrogel-aerogel structures exhibited significantly longer cooling time and delivered much higher cooling power by synergistically combining different cooling mechanisms. Overall, we show that combining fundamental interfacial transport physics with novel materials and interface engineering enables unique opportunities for innovations toward more sustainable energy and water technologies.
Biography: Zhengmao Lu is a Tenure Track Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at EPFL. Previously, Zhengmao was a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT with Prof. Jeffrey Grossman. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT as well, advised by Prof. Evelyn Wang. At EPFL, Zhengmao leads the Energy Transport Advances Laboratory (η-Lab), aiming to obtain a deeper understanding of phase change phenomena and develop more sustainable energy and water technologies by optimizing interfacial transport. Zhengmao is a recipient of the Keck Travel Award in Thermal Sciences and the Outstanding Graduate Research Award from MIT Mechanical Engineering.
Register here.
Biography: Zhengmao Lu is a Tenure Track Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at EPFL. Previously, Zhengmao was a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT with Prof. Jeffrey Grossman. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT as well, advised by Prof. Evelyn Wang. At EPFL, Zhengmao leads the Energy Transport Advances Laboratory (η-Lab), aiming to obtain a deeper understanding of phase change phenomena and develop more sustainable energy and water technologies by optimizing interfacial transport. Zhengmao is a recipient of the Keck Travel Award in Thermal Sciences and the Outstanding Graduate Research Award from MIT Mechanical Engineering.
Register here.
Links
Practical information
- General public
- Registration required