MAE Seminar: The Wonderful World of Heat Transfer

Details

The Wonderful World of Heat Transfer

Tuesday, January 17, 2022, at 12:50 pm
Location: MAE-A, Room 303

Tom I-P. Shih
School of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Purdue University

Abstract
Biological and engineered systems are often exposed to environments that are hostile to their survival. Examples include humans in space, electronics, hypersonic vehicles, and gas turbines. For gas turbines, efficiency increases with the temperature of the gas entering its turbine component. For aircraft, the desired turbine inlet temperature is 2000 °C, but the best Nickel-based superalloy with thermal barrier coatings can only handle about 1100 °C sustained temperature if structural integrity is to be maintained. For advanced electronics, the heat generated could be 1 kilowatt per square centimeter or more, and its operating environment must be maintained near room temperature. Thus, cooling is needed. Our body does a wonderful job through blood flow and sweating. This talk describes some of the challenges and opportunities on how heat transfer has been and could be used to manage harsh environments for operability, performance, and sustainability of engineered systems.

Biography
Tom I-P. Shih is a professor of aeronautics and astronautics (head of the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2009-19) and professor, by courtesy, of mechanical engineering at Purdue University. Also, he is the editor-in-chief of the AIAA Journal and chairs AIAA’s Committee on Higher Education. Before Purdue, he served as a mechanical engineer at NASA Lewis (now Glenn) Research Center and as a faculty member at the University of Florida, Carnegie Mellon University, Michigan State University, and Iowa State University (chair, Department of Aerospace Engineering, 2003-06). His research interests are in computational fluid mechanics, gas turbine heat transfer, aircraft icing, control of shock-wave/boundary-layer interactions, and thermal management. He started his undergraduate education at West Virginia University but completed his BS degree at the National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan. His MS and Ph.D. degrees are from The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is a fellow of ASME and AIAA and received the 2015 AIAA Energy Systems Award and the 2020 AIAA Thermophysics Award.

MAE Faculty Host: Steve Miller