明星八卦

The Group's work finds applications in the cooling of small-scale electronic devices used in major industries (energy including renewable energy, transport, on the ground, in air and in space , communications, defence and biomedical) where the dissipation of high heat fluxes is needed for safe and sustained highly efficient operation. In the larger scales, our work in this area involves single and two-phase heat transfer in thermal equipment (e.g. heat exchangers used in single and two-phase mode), novel heat transfer enhancement methods (e.g. metal foams, coatings) and applications in traditional and renewable thermal systems and plants.

The Group’s expertise includes first-principle modelling and mathematical optimisation of thermal energy systems as well as data driven approaches (e.g. Artificial Intelligence) for the analysis, fault detection and performance prediction of various process systems.

This reflects in the Group’s strong focus on solving industrially relevant problems such as, amongst others, fouling in thermal equipment which is a major issue that hinders sustainability, energy efficiency, profitability and safety of the process industry and is estimated to cost several tens of billions of dollars a year worldwide.

The main research themes investigated by the Group span several length scales from the micro-scale to very large-scale industrial facilities:

• Flow boiling and condensation in microchannels
• Pool and flow boiling and condensation in traditional systems
• Cooling of electronics and photovoltaic systems
• Single phase heat transfer
• Enhanced heat transfer methods and their application in thermal systems
• Coatings and nanofluids in heat transfer applications
• Fouling mitigation in heat exchangers
• Thermal systems including renewable energy systems and their application
• Modelling and energy efficiency in thermal systems
• Thermal and process efficiency of absorption/adsorption systems