Asegun Henry: Rethinking Problems in Thermal Science and Engineering - From Atoms to Applications
Friday, November 22, 2019 at 3:00pm to 4:00pm
3-270
Thermal energy transport, conversion and storage are central to many of the industries, technologies and devices we use every day, from our cell phones and laptops to our refrigerators and automobiles. However, there are still a number of thermal phenomena for which the underlying science is not well understood and on the engineering side, there are regimes of operation/performance that are theoretically possible, but inaccessible from a practical perspective. This talk will review how the Atomistic Simulation & Energy (ASE) research group at MIT has managed to realize important advancements on some of these problems, by rethinking problems from the beginning and challenging established paradigms.
More specifically, this talk will highlight the recent development of a new formalism for understanding heat conduction through phonons (e.g., atomic vibrations in rigid bodies) in terms of correlation instead of scattering. This new approach solved several inconsistencies between theory and experimental data for disordered materials and interfaces, and also enabled discovery of some non-intuitive effects that were previously considered impossible. In addition, this talk will review recent progress towards enabling heat transfer at extreme temperatures by using liquid metal as a heat transfer fluid in all graphite/ceramic infrastructures. Most notably, the ASE group has demonstrated the highest temperature pump on record (1400°C), which has opened up a new regime of operation that was previously inaccessible. This technological breakthrough has led to the conception of new energy systems, such as thermal energy grid storage (i.e., aka “Sun in a Box”) and a new CO2 free approach to hydrogen production based on methane pyrolysis. Both of these new technologies are currently under development in the ASE group and this talk will review progress to date. In addition, this talk will also cover what are believed to be the Top 5 Most Impactful Problems in Thermal Science and Engineering. The objective of this portion of the talk is to stimulate a broader interest from various scientific/engineering communities to begin working on these critical technological problems, because if solved, each will have a significant impact on mitigating climate change.
Asegun Henry
Assoc. Professor of Mechanical Engineering, MIT
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