Green Car Congress: Air Force Awards $6.8M to Study Nano-Scale Thermal Transport Between Dissimilar Materials

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Air Force Awards $6.8M to Study Nano-Scale Thermal Transport Between Dissimilar Materials

2 May 2008

A multi-university team led by the University of Michigan (U-M) has received a five-year, $6.8-million Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) grant to study the mechanics of nano-scale thermal transport between different materials. Led by Kevin Pipe, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, the research group includes nine scientists and engineers from three universities, including Brown University and the University of California at Santa Cruz.

The processes by which heat is transferred at interfaces between different materials are poorly understood. But in many systems, the ability to either efficiently transfer or block heat flow from one material to another is critically important to performance and reliability.

—Kevin Pipe

Inefficient heat flow is a main roadblock in the development of lasers and transistors that can attain higher powers. On the other hand, blocking heat exchange can dramatically improve the efficiency of thermoelectric energy conversion for compact power sources.

Pipe’s group will use ultrafast lasers in a special X-ray technique developed by David Reis, a team member and associate professor in Physics at U-M. The technique allows researchers to watch the vibrations of the atoms that carry heat energy across an interface.

Pipe and his colleagues will re-engineer the surfaces of materials to regulate the flow of heat. One of the objectives of the project is, according to the MURI topic announcement,

Ultimately, we want to predict the effect of composition and structure on thermal properties, in particular understanding how surface chemistry may be used to create materials and structures with unprecedented and/or tunable thermal and spectral properties.

In addition to Pipe, the U-M team includes materials science and engineering professors Rachel Goldman and John Kieffer, and assistant professor Max Shtein, as well as physics professor Roberto Merlin and associate professor David Reis. Other members of the team include physics professor Humphrey Maris and engineering professor Arto Nurmikko of Brown University and electrical engineering associate professor Ali Shakouri of UC Santa Cruz.

The Department of Defense’s MURI program is designed to focus on large multidisciplinary topic areas that intersect more than one traditional discipline, bringing together scientists and engineers with different backgrounds to accelerate both basic research and transition to application.

The FY 2008 MURI competition was for 19 topics; the Mechanics of Nano-Scale Thermal Transport between Dissimilar Materials was one of them. Another of the 19 topics was an investigation of the use of nanostructures as catalysts and develop methods by which they can be exploited in propulsion systems.

May 2, 2008 in Brief | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)