Heat transfer and energy conversion phenomena at nanoscale can differ significantly from that in macroscale. In this talk, I will start with a general discussion of nanoscale heat transfer and energy conversion processes, followed by a few examples of extraordinary heat transfer phenomena from our research.
The first example will be how nanostructures can be exploited to reduce the thermal conductivity of materials for more efficient thermoelectric energy conversion. In an opposite example, I will discuss how we engineer heat conduction to turn polymers from poor thermal conductors to highly thermally conductive materials. I will also present theory and experimental results which show thermal radiation heat transfer at nanoscale can exceed the blackbody radiation by three orders of magnitude. Such a phenomenon can be exploited to build new solid-state cooling devices by decoupling electrons and phonons.
I will conclude by introducing our newly established DOE Solid-State Solar-Thermal Energy Conversion Center (S3TEC Center).
Dr. Gang Chen is currently the Carl Richard Soderberg Professor of Power Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from UC Berkeley in 1993 working under then Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien. He was an assistant professor at Duke University from 1993-1997, and associate professor at University of California at Los Angeles from 1997-2001, and moved to MIT in 2001. He is a recipient of an NSF Young Investigator Award, a Guggenheim Fellow, an ASME Fellow, an ASME Heat Transfer Memorial Award, a R&D100 Award, and the first holder of the Warren and Towneley Rohsenow Professorship at MIT. He has published extensively in the area of nanoscale energy transport and conversion and nanoscale heat transfer. He serves on the editorial boards for four journals in heat transfer and nanotechnology and chairs the advisory board of ASME Nanotechnology Institute. He is the director of Solid-State Solar-Thermal Energy Conversion Center funded by the US DOE’s Energy Frontier Research Centers program.
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