Apart from my primary research interests in Transport in Porous Media and Biothermofluids, I also work on ideas related to phase change material applications, modeling manufacturing processes of microlithogpraphy and in general in convection heat transfer and fluid dynamics. Some details about these research projects are provided below. The publications page list the associated peer reviewed research publications.

Research projects related to specific topics are listed below. Many Thanks to my students for their contribution.

Phase Change Material Applications

• [2007 - 2009] Genetic Algorithm based Thermal Design Improvement of PCM based Composite Heat Sinks for Cooling Electronics
• [2006 - 2007] Optimization of PCM based Thermal Energy Storage Devices
• [2005 - 2008] Improved Design and Experimental verification of PCM based Composite Heat Sinks for Cooling Electronics

The thermal design of such a Composite Heat Sink, constructed using a vertical array of ‘fins’ or Elemental CHS (ECHS) of similar shape and size, made of PCM and BM, for its performance improvement has been studied in detail by many researchers in the recent decade. For such a CHS , operating under a given set point temperature for safe operation, under-usage of the latent heat of the PCM because of incomplete melting is a more critical CHS issue than the complete melting of PCM before the CHS reaches the SPT. The former results in a poorly performing CHS while the latter merely reduces the CHS potency for heat transfer enhancement. This is because after complete melting, the PCM continues to receive heat as sensible heat, instead of as latent heat. This maximization of the operation of CHS can be resolved using geometric optimization based on scale analysis.

Read the summary of this project for further details.

Heat Transfer in Manufacturing and Inverse Heat Transfer

• [2006] Inverse Heat Transfer Technique for Surface Temperature Minimization of Disc Heaters used in Microlithography
• [2003 - 2005] Heat Transfer Modeling of Manufacturing Processes in Microlithography

Convection

• [2007 - 2009] Natural Convection in Enclosures with Distributed Solid Blocks
• [2006] Heat Transfer Enhancement in Natural Convection using Adiabatic Blocks