Abstract: The current energy infrastructure is dominated by the combustion of the finite resources of fossil fuels leading to the release of more than 35 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO₂) per year and, in turn, environmental concerns that are intensifying every year. Therefore, there is an urgent need to manage the available primary energy resources judiciously and devise and implement thermally efficient energy systems and infrastructures to minimize electricity consumption and new CO₂ emission. These thermally driven energy systems can replace their electricity-driven counterparts for applications involving gas separation, space and water heating, space cooling, refrigeration, and energy storage. They can offer additional advantages such as (a) the absence of moving parts, enhancing durability, (b) the option to use nontoxic, non-flammable working fluids, such as water, and (c) low capital cost. However, the state-of-the-art heat-driven adsorption systems, known as temperature swing adsorption (TSA) systems, must undergo a significant overhaul should the electrically-driven systems be replaced with heat-driven systems. Major bottlenecks in their implementation include sluggish heat and mass transfer in porous packed-bed designs that use large adsorbent pellets and large footprints. Additionally, the low thermal conductivity of the adsorbent materials makes their rapid heating and cooling difficult, which is worsened by the presence of void spaces. As a result, their performance remains poorer than the electrically-driven systems.

My talk will explore the design and development of these energy systems from the ground up. I will explore an energy-efficient adsorption heat pump, which uses adsorbent-coated microchannels in detail. Using coated channels results in an operation with a heating time of less than 10% of the total cycle time, opening the possibility for the near-continuous heat pump operation. This highly asymmetric heat pump operation eliminates the primary implementation barrier associated with using an adsorption system in mainstream commercial cooling and heating applications. Silica gel-water pair used in a contactor of the size of a typical refrigerator compressor can provide 300 W of cooling at 5°C with a primary energy COP of 0.25. Tremendous improvement in this performance is possible using high-performance water adsorbents like MIL-101 (Cr). Therefore, along with these feasibility studies, it becomes imperative to understand how to fabricate and characterize these channels and demonstrate their performance through uptake and breakthrough analyses.

Meanwhile, this synthesis step gives rise to several complementary research avenues in particulate flows, additive manufacturing of adsorbent layers, and the rheology of adsorbent slurries, which will be discussed. I will also briefly talk about CO₂ capture and thermal energy storage using this technique. A diverse portfolio of such technologies should contribute toward the rise of the sustainable energy landscape in the near future. 

Biographical Sketch: Darshan joined Florida Tech as an assistant professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical and Civil Engineering in Spring 2020. He is the principal investigator of the Adsorption and Energy Technology Lab (AETL) at Florida Tech (https://research.fit.edu/pahinkar/). His research focuses on developing scalable and sustainable energy conversion and storage systems using computational and experimental techniques, characterizing integral fundamental transport phenomena, and demonstrating their practical applications. He advises three Ph.D. and three M.S. students, who lead research on various topics based on these energy systems. Before this appointment, Darshan received his B.E. in Mechanical Engineering from the Government College of Engineering, Pune, India, in 2006 and his M.E. in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India, in 2009. For the next two years, he worked as a Manager (Development) in Tata Motors Engineering Research Center, Pune, and his work involved thermal management of automobiles. Darshan graduated with a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Tech in the fall of 2016. He was a post-doctoral fellow at Georgia Tech Electronics Manufacturing and Reliability Laboratory before joining Florida Tech.

Abstract: The most recent round of climate model physics development at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) relied heavily on a library of large-eddy simulation case studies that served as observationally informed benchmarks for the ModelE3 climate model in single-column model mode. Parameter uncertainties were then inputs to an atmosphere-only multi-parameter tuning against satellite data sets, guided by machine learning. Large-eddy simulation case studies are also serving as testbeds for improving understanding of mixed-phase cloud microphysical processes, developing satellite retrieval algorithms, and testing ground- and spaceborne radar and lidar forward simulation software for the GISS climate model. Ongoing work is leading to new and improved case studies for GISS climate model development and other community uses.

Biographical Sketch: Dr. Fridlind’s studies of cloud microphysical properties and processes have concentrated at the intersection of detailed models and rich observational data sets, with an emphasis on aerosol-cloud interactions in ice-containing clouds that are most relevant to climate. Her studies have spanned mixed-phase stratiform clouds from Arctic to Antarctic, tropical to mid-latitude deep convection, mid-latitude continental cumulus and synoptic cirrus, and subtropical stratocumulus. She is a developer of ice microphysics schemes in the DHARMA large-eddy simulation code and, more recently, ice- and mixed-phase microphysics and macrophysics of stratiform clouds in the GISS ModelE3 Earth system model.

Abstract: Elastic metamaterials are structural materials that owe their unique wave manipulation capabilities to their complex internal architecture. Topological metamaterials are a special subclass of metamaterials whose behavior is directly controlled by the topology of their phonon bands. In this talk, I discuss the mechanics of a class of metamaterials known as topological Maxwell lattices. While these systems have been the object of extensive theoretical investigation, their classical treatment has been limited to ideal configurations and confined to the static limit. I will address the opportunities for design that open up when we account for the effect of structural non-idealities and we shift our focus to the dynamic behavior.

I will first discuss the dynamics of lattices in which the ideal hinges that appear in the theoretical models are replaced by structural ligaments capable of supporting bending deformation – a scenario practically encountered in lattices fabricated using cutting techniques or 3D printing. Aided by laser vibrometry experimental data, I will show how the zero-energy floppy edge modes predicted for ideal configurations morph into finite-frequency wave modes that localize on selected edges, resulting in asymmetric wave transport regimes. I will then address whether the topological attributes of Maxwell lattices, which are native to in-plane mechanics, can be exported to the out-of-plane response. I will show that, through appropriate design principles, it is possible to design bilayer structures in which coupling mechanisms transfer the in-plane topological polarization of the individual layers to the out-of-plane degrees of freedom, leaving a signature of topological polarization in the flexural response.

Biographical Sketch: Stefano Gonella is a Professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geo- Engineering at the University of Minnesota. He received Ph.D. and M.S. in aerospace engineering from Georgia Tech in 2007 and 2005, respectively, following a Laurea, also in aerospace engineering, from the Politecnico di Torino (Italy) in 2003. Before joining the University of Minnesota, he spent 3 years as a post-doctoral associate at Northwestern University. His research interests revolve around the modeling, simulation and experimental characterization of dynamical phenomena in architected materials, phononic crystals, and elastic metamaterials. His latest efforts have been directed towards understanding the role of topological states of matter in the design of mechanical metamaterials. He is also interested in the development of methodologies for structural diagnostics through the mechanistic adaptation of concepts of machine learning and computer vision. He was recipient of the NSF CAREER award in 2015.

Abstract: Accurate simulations of combustion and reacting fluid flows require complex, multi-step chemical kinetic models for describing the coupled chemical reactions. These models are often large and mathematically stiff, and contribute to the overall high computational expense of simulating practical phenomena relevant to energy, transportation, and aerospace applications. In this talk, I will introduce these issues, summarize the state-of-the-art in methods used to reduce computational costs, and describe some recent contributions from my group on adaptive preconditioning to accelerate implicit integration of stiff chemical kinetics. I will discuss how these developments, and others, are available in the open-source library Cantera. Finally, I will discuss how my group has extended strategies and methods from combustion modeling to other domains such as modeling of neutron transport and ocean biogeochemistry.

Biographical Sketch: Dr. Kyle Niemeyer is Associate Professor and Welty Faculty Fellow in the School of Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering at Oregon State University. He received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Case Western Reserve University in 2013. Dr. Niemeyer’s research focuses on computational modeling of reacting and non-reacting fluid flows, with a particular interest in numerical methods and high-performance computing. He is also an ardent advocate of open science, and serves as Associate Editor-in-Chief at the Journal of Open Source Software. He is currently working as a AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow with the the Industrial Efficiency & Decarbonization Office at the US Department of Energy.

Abstract: Kansei Engineering (KE) is a method designed by Mitsuo Nagamachi in the 1980s to translate consumers’ feelings and perceptions of a product (Kansei) into design elements. Its applications are used for new product development cases commonly in the automotive, construction machinery, electric home appliances, office machinery, house construction, costume and cosmetic industries (Nagamachi, 2002).  The word Kansei generally refers to sensitivity, sensibility, feeling and emotion.  In product design discipline, understanding user behavior and feelings and applying them to artifacts is crucial. Kansei Engineering providing data about the emotional connections between the design features and user perceptions, clearly defines the problem space by starting with the span the semantic space and span the space of properties steps where the possible/potential design features are selected to be tested (Schütte et al. 2004). It enables modelling the relationship between the design features and the corresponding feelings of the users empirically with quantitative data analysis. This talk will review our research between 2017 and 2022, on application of Kansei Engineering methodology in design process of novice designers (Erol, 2022; Erol & Leblebici Basar, 2020; 2022).

Biographical Sketch: Deniz Leblebici-Basar, Ph.D. is assistant professor at Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey. Has received her Doctoral, Master of Science and Bachelor of Science degrees in Industrial Design from Istanbul Technical University. She has been serving as a researcher and faculty at Istanbul Technical University since 2003. She studied design cognition and worked as a research scholar at the Cognition and Language Lab, University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany, U.S.A., in 2009 and 2015. She has been awarded several national and international grants on her academic research areas; cognitive processes of designing activity and cognitive modeling of the design process, user experience design, user experience psychology and university- industry collaborations. Between 2016-2018 she has served as Vice Dean responsible of administrative services at the Faculty of Architecture, ITU. Between 2018-2020 she has served as Visual Communications Director of Istanbul Technical University. She is in the editorial board of AZ ITU Journal of Architecture since 2020.

Abstract: A story about how focus led Brian into mechanical engineering, the field of design, and the various journeys that these foundations led to. This includes the design of such wide ranging products as automated cow milking systems, combustion engines and table saw safety systems. It also includes starting a company with the added challenge of hardware in the aftermath of the 2008 recession by being the first startup to ever crowdfund. He’ll share how he raised millions in venture capital, fell off the venture track in 2016 and learned how to build a business from there profitably – as well as his experience building overseas offices in Asia and Ukraine.  And he’ll share how his company keeps innovating after ten years in business, including his latest solution to foster the development of the skill of focus in education.

Biographical Sketch: Brian is the co-CEO and co-Founder of Swivl, Inc. – an educational technology company with solutions in over 50,000 schools and universities worldwide.  Brian has a BS in Mechanical Engineering at the University of New Hampshire and has an MS in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University with a depth in Design. Since Stanford, he was a lecturer at Stanford – teaching Introduction to Visual Thinking to product design majors – and worked in diverse industry markets like consumer electronics, power tools and medical devices as a product design consultant. He founded Swivl in 2010 and grew it quietly into one of the more successful robotics companies of the last decade with over 150 employees worldwide. He’s a serial innovator and continues to develop new hardware and software solutions for the educational market to this day.

Abstract: Due to recent advances in resolution and sensitivity, Ion/Electrical Mobility (IM) has become a ubiquitous tool in Aerosol Science and Analytical Chemistry. Its ability to aid in the separation of gas phase analytes now rivals some of the most employed techniques such as liquid chromatography and gas chromatography and recent Mass Spectrometers regularly have a mobility cell embedded in or hyphenated with the system.  In its most formal definition, IM is a transport property that describes the ability of an ion, i.e., charged molecule/cluster/particle, to traverse a gas medium by means of the energy provided by an external electric field. As the ion travels, the way it interacts with the gas medium varies substantially depending on the flow regime and scale. When referring to IM in the ‘free molecular’ regime, it is also assumed that the ion/charged entity does not ‘significantly’ perturb the gas, i.e., when the characteristic size of the ion is much smaller than the mean free path of the gas. Under free molecular flow, ion mobility is necessarily a function of the gas thermodynamic properties (pressure, temperature, mass, size, degrees of freedom), those of the ion, any existing interaction potentials (e.g., Lennard-Jones-like, ion-dipole, or ion-quadrupole interactions), and the energy exchange involved in the process. As is normally the case for other transport properties, the value referenced as IM is an average value for a large enough ensemble of ions over many collisions rather than a value at any given instant.

While the technique has undoubtedly been successful, understanding the process of how ion and gas interact is rather complex and still remains incomplete to this day. With resolutions reaching over one thousand, empirically observed separations between analytes are difficult to explain unless the theory behind the interaction is carefully portrayed. This work is an attempt at describing the logical process of understanding how ion mobility may be theoretically and numerically calculated, from the simplest idea that assumes that ion mobility is in inverse proportion to the average “projected shadow” of the ion, through how different potentials or field strengths may affect the interaction, to the consideration that even internal degrees of freedom may influence the separation. Given the multiple fields where ion mobility is considered, an evolutionary description of the different theories is sought, carefully trying to check where the theories match or deviate and where new approaches are needed.

Biographical Sketch: Carlos Larriba-Andaluz got his bachelor’s degree in Aerospace at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. He moved to the States after an abridged stay at Iberia Airlines. He got his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Yale University in 2010 followed by a postdoctoral Associate and Ramon Areces Fellow at the University of Minnesota in the department of Mechanical Engineering. In 2015, he started a tenure-track position at the Purdue University School of Engineering and Technology in Indianapolis. His main area of research is steered towards electrosprays of ionic liquids under vacuum (used in clean electrical propulsion for satellites), dielectric electrosprays by means of charge injection atomization (for efficient production and control of fuel drop generation and combustion), Ion Mobility Spectrometry (IMS) coupled with Mass Spectrometry (MS) and developing a 2D axial symmetric, multi-chemistry, sectional Aerosol-Plasma model and the study of afterglow and pulsing plasmas for ion and Silane nanoparticle collection. In IMS-MS, current projects include structural characterization of large biomolecules, chemical warfare detection, liquid and solid polymers, proteins, asphaltenes, and Room Temperature Ionic Liquids. Theoretically and numerically, he has developed a suite of algorithms, freely available and used by several university departments, to calculate heat, mass, and momentum transfer in the free molecular regime for all atom models using Kinetic Theory of Gases including the possibility of diffuse reemission, polarization and vdw potentials. His work is supported by several NSF and industry grants. His long-term goal is to design mobility apparatuses and a new set of parallelized algorithms that combines knowledge from DSMC and Lattice Boltzmann algorithms.

Three ME faculty will join us for a panel discussion about successfully navigating graduate school and applying this knowledge to your career or start-up. Come and learn about their graduate experiences and ask questions.

Prof. SeungYeon Kang joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering in 2021 as an Assistant Professor. She earned her B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Cornell University and Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Harvard University. Prior to joining as a faculty, she was a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and then served as the UCONN site program manager for NSF’s SHAP3D additive manufacturing center. She also has industry experience working at Samsung SDI Battery Materials R&D Center as a Senior Research Engineer. Her diverse research experience led to establishment of a highly interdisciplinary research lab that focuses on advanced laser processing techniques and energy storage technology.

Prof. Georgios Matheou an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Connecticut. Before joining UConn, he was a research scientist at Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a Visiting Associate in Aerospace at the California Institute of Technology. He received his Diploma in Mechanical Engineering (2002) from the National Technical University of Athens and a Ph.D. in Aeronautics from Caltech (2008). Dr. Matheou’s research interests include fluid dynamics and turbulence, modeling of multi-scale multi-physics flows, numerical methods, and high-performance computing. Dr. Matheou received the American Physical Society’s Milton Van Dyke (2011) and Galley of Fluid Motion Awards (2016 and 2021), NASA’s Early Career Public Achievement Medal, the University Teaching Innovation Award, and the NSF CAREER Award.

Prof. Georges Pavlidis joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Connecticut as an Assistant Professor in 2022. Prior to that, he was an NRC Postdoctoral Researcher in the Nanoscale Spectroscopy Group at NIST. He earned his M.Eng in Mechanical Engineering from Imperial College London in 2013 and his Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2018. Dr. Pavlidis specializes in the thermal characterization of WBG semiconductors for RF and power electronics. He has developed electrical/optical methods, with high spatial and temporal resolution, to assess the performance and reliability of III-nitrides devices. His recent publications investigate improving hBN polariton lifetimes and developing high throughput techniques for interfacial thermal conductance mapping.