Thermal Energy Transport and Conversion: Fundamentals and Applications

Renkun Chen, UC San Diego

Wednesday November 18, 11:00am - 12:00pm

EBUII Room 479

Abstract: Heat transfer plays an important role in a variety of technologies such as energy conversion and storage, energy efficiency, microelectronics, and data storage. The fundamental length scales associated with the basic heat carriers, such as phonons, electrons, and photons, generally fall in the range of nanometer to micron meters.  Therefore, exploring and exploiting basic nanoscale thermal transport and conversion phenomena hold the key for developing high performance devices and systems for thermal processes. There has been extensive research and progress in this area, which leads to both a deeper understanding of thermal transport phenomena as well as technological impacts. In this talk, I will present the work conducted in my research group on both the fundamental and application aspects of thermal energy transport and conversion, including nanoscale phonon transport, solar thermal energy conversion, materials and devices for improving energy efficiency and electronic cooling.

Bio: Renkun Chen is an Associate Professor at the University of California, San Diego. He received his B.S. degree in Engineering Thermo-physics from Tsinghua University in 2004, and Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 2008. Following a one-year stint as a postdoctoral fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he joined the faculty of UC San Diego in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in 2009. His research group is interested in physics, materials, and devices for thermal energy transport and conversion.