Context and challenge: boiling is a phase-change phenomenon with broad applications, especially important for thermal management and power generation. Merged bubbles may blanket a wider area of the surface, and departs less frequently than its smaller predecessors, temporarily suppressing new nucleation sites and locally throttling heat‑transfer efficiency.
Approach and objective: bubble coalescence could also lead to them jumping off the surface due to the excess surface energy, resulting in earlier bubble departure. Understanding and controlling bubble coalescence is therefore pivotal in boiler and evaporator design, to simultaneously improve systems’ heat transfer efficiency and maximum heat flux.
If you plan to do a thesis or semester project on this:
What we expect: background in heat transfer, fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, and mechanical design. Hands-on experience with experiments/FEM modeling softwares will be a plus.
What you will learn: design of boiling setup; high-speed imaging; use and design of resistive temperature detectors; scientific communication through reports and presentation.
Contact: Rameez Iqbal ([email protected])