Dimos Poulikakos | dimos.poulikakos@ethz.ch
Laboratory of Thermodynamics in Emerging Technologies (LTNT), Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering, ETH Zurich CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland
Abstract: It should not be difficult to argue that heat transfer, is omnipresent in nature and technology. In this lecture, after some introductory thoughts on the omnipresence of heat transfer, I will rely on two examples form my own very recent research that particularly exemplify and underpin the rich content and significance of the science of heat transfer. I will first focus on the very fundamental mechanisms of water freezing occurring with abundance in nature and on man-made structures. I will discuss how environmental conditions (air flow or humidity changes) can have an unexpected effect on the ice nucleation mechanism, which could be detrimental to the expected icephobicity of even superdydrophobic surfaces. The second example comes from the area of electronics cooling with novel microfluidic concepts, a collaborative effort between my lab at ETH Zurich and the IBM Research Lab in Zurich. The focus will be on 3D integrated cooling of electronics, the 3D integration being the future in electronics packaging, necessitated both from the standpoint of minimizing speed of communication between chips, as well as the standpoint of optimal space utilization. Laser Induced Fluorescence (LIF) is employed here at the microchip level to measure the transient temperature field of the coolant, and micro-particle tracking visualization is used to determine the flow behavior field in 3D integrated chip arrangements. We show for the first time unexpected flow instabilities and the related heat transfer behavior, both of which we have to understand and control in our quest toward temperature control and hot spot avoidance in 3D integrated electronics.
Keywords: Heat transfer, Nanoengineering, Facile Nanostructuring, Icing, Microthermodluidics, Environmentally aware computing