Das Lands NSF Grant for Cooling Research

thermal management

Siddhartha Das, associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Maryland (UMD), is the Principal Investigator (PI) on a new National Science Foundation (NSF) grant that will support research into an efficient, cost-effective solution for high power density electronic devices.

Working in collaboration with Michigan Technological University (MTU) Professor Amitabh Narain, Das’s group will seek to exploit known properties of liquids that are boiled on a flat surface. Such liquids draw heat from the surface and thus cause it to cool, in a process known as “flow boiling.” The intrinsically large heat transfer capabilities of such flow boiling events have been previously used to develop low-cost cooling strategies.

To harness these properties for thermal management of electronics, the UMD and MTU teams will utilize an environmentally friendly dielectric liquid with low boiling temperatures (40-50 degree C) near atmospheric pressure as the working liquid for flow boiling to develop extremely efficient and low-cost cooling strategies.

Acoustothermal film boiling of the dielectric fluid modeled using atomistic simulations.

More specifically, the project will investigate the effect of fluid-filled microstructured surfaces and imposed vibrations of micro-nanoscale amplitudes on improving the overall flow-boiling-driven heat transfer with this specific dielectric liquid.

The UMD team will be responsible for performing continuum thermo-fluid simulations to model the process and at the same time develop atomistic simulations to identify the mechanisms underpinning the effect of vibrations on improving the heat transfer.

“If successful, this proposal, in addition to providing a highly efficient cooling solution, can be a game-changer for developing cooling strategies that will enable improved waste heat recovery as clean electricity for applications in data centers and hybrid electric vehicles,” Das said.

A UMD faculty member since 2019, Das conducts research on the science and engineering of soft and polymeric materials, interfacial transport, and small-scale fluid mechanics for fundamental discoveries, including in ion dynamics at soft interfaces, liquid transport in soft-material-functionalized nanochannels, drop behavior on squishy surfaces, and charge-driven nanoparticle-lipid-bilayer interactions. His research also supports some of today’s most advanced applications in additive manufacturing.

Das has published 180 journal papers, including papers in Nature Materials, Science Advances, Nucleic Acid Research, Nature Communications, Advanced Materials, ACS Nano (October 2021 and April 2021), Matter, and Macromolecules. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and also of the Royal Society of Chemistry. In July 2022, he was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Engineering Technology (IET), based in the United Kingdom.

Published October 5, 2023