Keynotes

Department of Defense Science and Technology Opportunities

Chief, Southern Office of Aerospace Research and Development (SOARD), Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), Department of Defense (DoD), USA

Abstract
The United States Department of Defense (DoD) has Science and Technology (S&T) Offices at each of its components (i.e. Air Force, Army, and Navy).  They are leading technology research and engineering missions to empower, relieve burden, protect and support our military forces through integrated research, development, and engineering solutions.  DoD S&T offices are located around the world to promote cooperation between our S&T offices and international researchers, in order to advance science, engineering, and technical capabilities relevant to the overall DoD mission.  These S&T offices have a workforce of world-class scientists and engineers dedicated to solving the hardest technology problems.  They are dedicated to support the discovery and transfer of technology, and assist in evaluating technologies.  DoD S&T offices establish alliances with industry, agencies, academic centers, and foreign governments to maximize the use of research funds.

Thermal, membrane, and solvent separations for desalination and resource recovery

John H. Lienhard V, PhD, PE
Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Abstract
The world’s renewable fresh water supply, from net precipitation over land, has become much more variable as the Earth’s surface temperature has risen.  And world population has nearly quadrupled during the past century.  As a result of these factors, water scarcity is a growing problem worldwide, impacting water for drinking, sanitation, food crop production, and ecosystems.  In parallel, the rising use of renewable technologies is driving demand for critical materials, including lithium and rare earth elements.
Desalination removes dissolved ions—salts—from water, thereby expanding the supply of freshwater. Advanced separation technologies can selectively remove desirable ions from natural brines or wastewaters, recovering valuable minerals for industrial use.
In this talk, I will discuss my group’s research on energy use in desalination, on selective recovery of chemical and mineral resources from saline water, and on the application of concepts from thermal systems engineering to improve the performance of both thermal and membrane separations. Examples will be drawn from reverse osmosis, humidification-dehumidification, membrane distillation, solvent extraction, and lithium capture. I will also discuss our work on large-scale desalination at California’s last nuclear power plant, to provide both energy and fresh water without carbon emissions.

Biography
H. Lienhard V is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor and the founding Director of the Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) at MIT. During more than 35 years on the MIT faculty, Lienhard’s research has focused on heat and mass transfer, water purification and desalination, and thermodynamics.
Lienhard received his BS and MS in thermal engineering at UCLA and his PhD in fluid dynamics at UC San Diego. His research on water purification has encompassed thermodynamics and transport phenomena, electrochemical and membrane separations, solvent extraction, critical materials recovery, and system design. Lienhard has supervised more than 100 graduate theses and postdoctoral associates, and he is the author of more than 300 peer-reviewed publications. He has received more than 40 US patents, most commercialized through start-up companies.
Lienhard is a Fellow of ASME, AAAS, and ASTFE. He is a registered professional engineer in Massachusetts and Vermont. Lienhard’s awards include the 2012 ASME Technical Communities Globalization Medal, the 2015 ASME Heat Transfer Memorial Award, the 2019 ASME Edward F. Obert Award, and the 2021 AIChE/ASME Donald Q. Kern Award. Lienhard has also published textbooks on heat transfer, on measurement and instrumentation, and on thermal modeling. As Director of J-WAFS, Lienhard has sponsored millions of dollars of research on food and water supply for a growing population on a rapidly warming planet.

Microfluidics Applied to Underground Multiphase Flow and Microencapsulation

Marcio S Carvalho

Department of Mechanical Engineering, PUC-Rio

Abstract
Recent advances in fabrication of microfluidic devices and flow control have significantly expanded the application of microfluidics, including analytical chemistry (lab-on-chip), biological applications (organ-on-chip), small scale multiphase flow analysis (reservoir-on-chip). In this talk, we discuss the use of microfluidics in two different applications: pore-scale analysis of multiphase flow of complex fluids and microencapsulation process.
Multiphase flow in subsurface formations is ubiquitous in oil production and CO2 storage and utilization processes. Accurate flow models, necessary in the design and optimization of enhanced oil recovery and CO2 injection processes, require detailed description of pore scale multiphase flow and phase behavior. Traditionally, flow analysis at different temperature and pressure conditions relies on laboratory-scale experiments using core-flooding systems, PVT cells and other equipment. The experiments are expensive, require long measurement times, large volumes of fluids and do not reveal pore-scale phenomena. In this context, microfluidics emerges as a valuable technique. It can be used to gain fundamental understanding of pore-scale multiphase flow, enabling the correlation between pore scale events and macroscopic flow characteristics. Here, we present various multiphase flow analyses using porous media microfluidic devices to examine oil displacement by water, emulsions, and foam, as well as CO2 storage in saline aquifers. By visualizing pore-scale phenomena, we can correlate these events with macroscopic flow characteristics, which may be leveraged to optimize subsurface processes.
The second part of the talk is focused on microencapsulation process. Microcapsules are used in many sectors of industry when a physical barrier between the core material and the external environment is required. They protect their cargo and ultimately release it in a controlled way. Microfluidics can be used to produce monodispersed microcapsules with precise control of the shell properties, which optimizes the content release. We present the use of microfluidics to produce microcapsules for different applications, including food products with controlled delivery of agents in the intestine, protecting them from gastric fluids, and controlling gelation process by acid encapsulation.

Biography
Prof. Marcio Carvalho received a B.Sc degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Military Institute of Engineering (IME) in 1989, M.Sc. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) in 1991 and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota, in 1995. He worked as Senior Process Development Engineer at 3M Company and Imation Corporation (in USA) in the areas of pre-metered coating and drying technologies. In 1998, he moved back to Brazil, where he is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at PUC-Rio. He is also a member of the Graduate Faculty in the Department of Chemical Engineering & Materials Science at the University of Minnesota since 2007. His research is focused on several aspects of capillary hydrodynamics, including coating process, non-Newtonian fluid mechanics in micro scale flows, microencapsulation, flow of complex fluids in porous media with applications in enhanced oil recovery and CO2 underground storage. Prof. Carvalho received the Young Investigator Award (2004) and the Talmadge Award (2020), both from the International Society for Coating Science and Technology (ISCST) and the ANP Technical Innovation Award in 2018. He is a level 1-A Researcher from the Brazilian Research Council (CNPq) and has published more than 130 papers in scientific journals, advised 14 postdoctoral fellows, 24 PhD thesis and 49 MSc thesis. He consults for different companies, mainly in the US and Asia in the area of coating processes. In the past few years, his research group has been mostly funded by the Brazilian Research Council (CNPq), Coordination of Superior Level Staff Improvement (CAPES), Carlos Chagas Filho Research Support Foundation (FAPERJ) and different companies from Brazil, USA and Asia, including Petrobras, Equinor, Repsol-Sinopec, Shell, 3M, Saint-Gobain, Dow, Samsung and Fuji Film.

Manipulation of Fine Particle Behaviour in Respect of Separation and Wall Depositio

Martin Sommerfeld and Richard Tribess
Multiphase Flow Systems, Institute of Process Engineering,
Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, Germany
Martin.Sommerfeld@ovgu.de

Abstract
The technical application of airborne fine particles is increasing in sectors such as pharmaceutics, medical applications, food production, and gasification of bio-materials. A key challenge in these processes is the separation of fine particles from turbulent gas streams, using either particle adhesion or redirection of flow. However, for particlessmaller than 0.5 µm, inertia-based separation becomes ineffective, necessitating the use of field forces like magnetic, electrostatic, or thermophoretic forces.
This study focuses on particle separation from hot and cold gases, highlighting the role of thermophoresis in fine particle removal and wall deposition mitigation. Computational simulations using the Euler/Lagrange method have been applied to model particle behavior in various systems. The gas flow is computed with RANS or LES turbulence models, while particle tracking considers multiple forces, including drag, Brownian motion, and thermophoresis.
Simulations are performed in applications such as cyclone separators and hot gas channels to assess separation efficiency and particle deposition. For example, thermophoresis is used to reduce soot deposition on optical windows in automotive exhaust pipes.
The results demonstrate the capabilities of numerical simulations in optimizing particle-laden flow separation processes. Future work will involve a more detailed analysis of particle size-dependent behavior and boundary condition variations.

Biography
Dr. Martin Sommerfeld earned his Dipl.-Ing. degree in Aeronautical Engineering from RWTH Aachen in 1981, followed by his Ph.D. (1984) at the same institution. He gained international research experience as a fellow at Kyoto University, Japan, before leading the Two-Phase Flow group at the University of Erlangen. Since 1994, he has held a full professorship in Mechanical Process Engineering, now based at Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg. Dr. Sommerfeld’s research is widely recognized, particularly in multiphase flow modeling, measurement techniques, and numerical predictions. He has contributed over 225 journal papers, 8 books, and numerous conference presentations. Dr. Sommerfeld is also the recipient of prestigious awards such as the DECHEMA Award and the Robert T. Knapp Award. His work has advanced the fields of computational fluid dynamics and multiphase flows, exemplified by his long-standing role as organizer of workshops and editor of significant academic volumes. He continues to focus on experimental and numerical analysis of multiphase flows using cutting-edge optical and simulation techniques.

FARAWAY, SO CLOSE: HIGH RESOLUTION INVESTIGATIONS OF BOILING HEAT TRANSFER, FROM CRYOGENIC FLUIDS TO HIGH-PRESSURE WATER

Matteo Bucci

Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

Abstract
In every field of science, the possibility of discovering and understanding new phenomena or testing new hypotheses is strongly related to and limited by the capability of observation. Here, we will discuss recent advances in experimental boiling heat transfer research made possible by unique experimental facilities and non-intrusive high-resolution optical diagnostics. We will analyze the capabilities and limitations of these techniques in supporting the understanding of fundamental two phase heat transfer problems, with a focus on extreme boiling conditions such as the boiling of water at high pressure and temperature, close to nuclear reactor conditions, the boiling of dielectric fluids for electronic cooling applications, or the boiling of cryogenic fluids relevant to space propulsion and energy storage. The use of these diagnostics has been instrumental in providing answers to long-standing fundamental questions on the fluid dynamics and heat transfer nature of these processes.

Biography
Matteo Bucci is the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Associate Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His research group studies two-phase heat transfer mechanisms in nuclear reactors and space systems, develops high-resolution non-intrusive diagnostics and surface engineering techniques to enhance two-phase heat transfer, and creates machine learning tools to accelerate data analysis and conduct autonomous heat transfer experiments. He has won several awards for his research and teaching, including the MIT Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Excellence in Teaching (2020), ANS/PAI Outstanding Faculty Award (2018 and 2023), the UIT-Fluent Award (2006), the European Nuclear Education Network Award (2010), and the 2012 ANS Thermal-Hydraulics Division Award. Matteo is the founding editor and deputy Editor-in-Chief of AI Thermal Fluids. He also serves as Editor of Applied Thermal Engineering, is the founder and coordinator of the NSF Thermal Transport Café and works as a consultant for the nuclear industry.

Radiative Heat Transfer in Combustion Systems

Abstract
In many important combustion applications, heat transfer is dominated by thermal radiation from combustion gases and soot. Thermal radiation from combustion gases is extremely complicated, and accurate and efficient predictions are only now becoming possible with the use of accurate global methods, such as full-spectrum k-distributions, and with state-of-the-art line-by-line accurate Monte Carlo methods. The coupling between turbulence and radiation can more than double the radiative loss from a flame. Radiative properties and computational methods will be briefly discussed, and several examples of turbulent reacting flows, an oxy-fuel furnace, high pressure laminar flames and high-pressure fuel spray in combustion engines will be presented. Thermal radiation can also be used as an optical diagnostic tool to determine temperature and concentration distributions, which will be briefly discussed.

Biography
Dr. Modest received his Dipl.-Ing. degree from the Technical University in Munich (1968), and in 1972 obtained his M.S. and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley. For several years he taught at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of Southern California, followed by 23 years a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University, from which he retired in 2009 with the title of Distinguished Professor Emeritus. He then served as Shaffer and George Professor of Engineering at the University of California, Merced, from which he retired in 2018 as Distinguished Professor Emeritus.
During his career Dr. Modest has made many seminal contributions in all areas of radiative heat transfer, as well as in the field of laser processing of materials. He is perhaps best known for his work on thermal radiation in combustion systems, and is the author of “Radiative Heat Transfer” (presently in its 4 th ed). He has over 370 refereed publications, including 2 books, 10 book chapters. He is an ASME Honorary Member and was recipient of many national and international honors, including the ASME Heat Transfer Memorial Award, the AIAA Thermophysics Award, the Intersocietal Max Jakob Memorial Award, the German Humboldt Research Award, and the Elsevier Poynting Award.

Combining Classical Analytical Methods and Modern Numerical Techniques: The Hybrid Approach to Simulation

Renato M. Cotta

1 Mech. Eng. Dept., POLI & COPPE, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, UFRJ, Brazil

2 IPqM-CTMRJ, General Directorate of Nuclear and Technological Development, DGDNTM, Brazilian Navy, RJ, Brazil

Abstract
The classical analytical methods for partial differential equations had their conception mostly within the 19 th and first half of the 20 th centuries, with very restrictive applicability bounds due to the unavoidable formulation simplifications and limited computational capabilities of that period. Though the idea behind discrete numerical methods was already introduced within this period, its dissemination had to wait for the advent of the digital computer and then an explosion of numerical techniques and schemes naturally followed, tearing the straitjacket of the problem formulations complexity level, along the second half of the 20 th century. Simulation in engineering sciences then evolved to an unprecedent analysis power, leading to most of the material progress achieved till the present. With the inherent increase in formulation complexity needs and accuracy requirements, computational effort grew to a level, in different classes of problems, not closely followed by the concurrent continuous hardware improvement. In consequence, alternative hybrid numerical-analytical approaches were proposed along the way, with different degrees of generality and success, that attempted to reduce computing effort, improve accuracy, and warrant robustness. The Generalized Integral Transform Technique (or just GITT) is a well-established hybrid approach in the Transport Phenomena wide field, which derives from the classical integral transform method for linear diffusion problems. It combines controlled truncation of eigenfunction expansions with error controlled numerical solutions of ordinary differential equations to provide hybrid numerical-analytical solutions to different classes of problems such as nonlinear formulations, moving boundary problems, irregular domains, coupled problems, heterogenous media, boundary layer and Navier-Stokes equations. The relative merits of the hybrid methodology are discussed, especially in connection with highly intensive computational tasks that require numerous computations of the associated direct problem, such as optimization studies, inverse problem analysis, physics informed neural networks, and simulation under uncertainty. Recent progresses in this computational-analytical approach are here reviewed and a few selected applications from on-going projects dealing with petroleum reservoirs, environmental impact, and water desalination are highlighted.

Biography
Prof. Renato M. Cotta obtained his B.Sc. in Mechanical & Nuclear Engineering, at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, UFRJ, Brazil, in 1981, and his PhD in Mechanical & Aerospace Eng. from North Carolina State Univ., NCSU, USA, in 1985. He became Assistant Professor at the Aeronautics Technological Institute, ITA, Brazil, 1985-1987, then Associate Prof., at UFRJ, in 1987, and Professor, at COPPE-UFRJ in 1994, and at POLI-UFRJ in 1997, until the present. Author of more than 600 articles, 10 books, and supervisor of 49 MSc, 39 PhD, and 18 PosDocs. He is member of 15 Editorial Boards, including Int. J. Heat & Mass Transfer, Int. Comm. Heat & Mass Transfer, Int. J. Thermal Sciences, and Editor of the Annals of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. Served as President of the Brazilian Association of Mechanical Sciences & Engineering, ABCM, from 2000-2001, as member of the Scientific Council, International Centre for Heat & Mass Transfer, ICHMT, since 1993, of the Executive Comm. ICHMT, 2006-2022, ICHMT EC Chairman, 2017-2018, and Congress Comm., Int. Union of Theoretical & Applied Mechanics, IUTAM, 2012-2018. Served as Executive Director for the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, 2012-2015. He received the ICHMT Hartnett-Irvine Award, in 2009 and 2015, the ICHMT Fellowship Award, 2019, the National Order of Scientific Merit, Brazil, in 2009 (Comendador) and 2018 (Grã-Cruz), and the National Order of Naval Merit, Brazil, 2018. In 2023, he was awarded the prestigious Luikov Medal of the ICHMT, 2022 edition. Member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, since 2009, National Engineering Academy, since 2011, and The World Academy of Sciences, TWAS, since 2012. Holds the Doctor Honoris Causa title from Université de Reims, URCA, France, since 2018. President of the National Commission of Nuclear Energy, CNEN, both regulatory body and science promoter in nuclear energy in Brazil, 2015-2017. Adjunct Professor at the University of Miami, 1993-2005, and Leverhulme Trust Visiting Prof. at the University College London, UCL, UK. Member of the National Council of Energy Policy, CNPE, Ministry of Mines and Energy, Brazil, 2020-2022. Member of the Technical Working Group (TWG) in Nuclear Desalination, IAEA, 2021-2024. Since 2017, is commissioned as Senior Technical Consultant (Amazul S.A.) for the General Director of Nuclear and Technological Development, in the Brazilian Navy.