<p>The present study investigates the capability of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) extensively to predict hydrodynamics and heat transfer characteristics of FC-72 flow boiling in a 2.5-mm ´ 5.0-mm rectangular channel and experimentally explores system instabilities: <em>density wave oscillation</em> (DWO), <em>pressure drop oscillation</em> (PDO) and <em>parallel channel instability</em> (PCI) in a micro-channel heat sink containing 38 parallel channels having a hydraulic diameter of 316-μm. </p> <p>The computational method performs transient analysis to model the entire flow field and bubble behavior for subcooled flow boiling in a rectangular channel heated on two opposite walls at high heat flux conditions of about 40% – 80% of <em>critical heat flux</em> (CHF).  The 3D CFD solver is constructed in ANSYS Fluent in which the <em>volume of fluid</em> (VOF) model is combined with a <em>shear stress transport</em> (SST) <em>k</em>-<em>ω</em> turbulent model, a surface tension model, and interfacial phase change model, along with a model for effects of shear-lift and bubble collision dispersion to overcome a fundamental weakness in modeling multiphase flows.  Detailed information about bubble distribution in the vicinity of the heated surface, thermal conduction inside the heating wall, local heat fluxes passing through the solid-fluid interface, and velocity and temperature profiles, which are not easily observed or measured by experiments, is carefully evaluated.  The simulation results are compared to experimental data to validate the solver’s ability to predict the flow configuration with single/double-side heating.  The added momentum by shear-lift is shown to govern primarily the dynamic behavior of tiny bubbles stuck on the heated bottom wall and therefore has a more significant impact on both heat transfer and heated wall temperature.  By including bubble collision dispersion force, coalescence of densely packed bubbles in the bulk region is significantly inhibited, with more giant bubbles even incurring additional breakup into smaller bubbles and culminating in far less vapor accumulation along the top wall.  Including these momentums is shown to yield better agreement with local interfacial behavior along the channel, overall flow pattern, and heat transfer parameters (wall temperature and heat transfer coefficient) observed and measured in experiments.  The computational approach is also shown to be highly effective at predicting local phenomena (velocity and temperature profiles) not easily determined through experiments.  Different flow regimes predicted along the heated length exhibit a number of dominant mechanisms, including bubble nucleation, bubble growth, coalescence, vapor blankets, interfacial waviness, and residual liquid sub-layer, all of which agree well with the experiment.  Vapor velocity is shown to increase appreciably along the heated length because of increased void fraction, while liquid velocity experiences large fluctuations.  Non-equilibrium effects are accentuated with increasing mass velocity, contributing minor deviations of fluid temperature from simulations compared to those predicted by the analytical method.  Predicted wall temperature is reasonably uniform in the middle of the heated length but increases in the entrance region due to sensible heat transfer in the subcooled liquid and decreases toward the exit, primarily because of flow acceleration resulting from increased void fraction.  When it comes to analyzing heat transfer mechanisms at extremely high heat flux via CFD, predicted flow pattern, bubble behavior, and heat transfer parameters (such as wall temperature excursion and thermal energy concentration) clearly represent phenomena of premature CHF, which take place slightly earlier than actual operating conditions.  But, despite these slight differences, the present computational work does demonstrate the ability to effectively predict the severe degradation in heat transfer performance commonly encountered at heat fluxes nearing CHF.  </p> <p>Much of the published literature addressing flow instabilities in thermal management systems employing micro-channel modules are focused on instability characteristics of the module alone, and far fewer studies have aimed at understanding the relationship between these characteristics and compressive volume in the flow loop external to the module.  From a practical point of view, developers of micro-channel thermal management systems for many modern applications are in pursuit of practical remedies that would significantly mitigate instabilities and their impact on cooling performance.  Experiments are executed using FC-72 as a working fluid with a wide range of mass velocities and a reasonably constant inlet subcooling of ~15°C.  The flow instabilities are reflected in pressure fluctuations detected mainly in the heat sink’s upstream plenum.  Both inlet pressure and pressure drop signals are analyzed in pursuit of amplitude and frequency characteristics for different mass velocities and over a range of heat fluxes.  The current experimental study also examines the effects of compressible volume location in a closed pump-driven flow loop designed to deliver FC-72 to a micro-channel test module having 38 channels with 315-μm hydraulic diameter.  Three accumulator locations are investigated: upstream of the test module, downstream of the test module, and between the condenser and pump.  Both high-frequency temporal parameter data and high-speed video records are analyzed for ranges of mass velocity and heat flux, with inlet subcooling held constant at ~15°C.  PDO is shown to dominate when the accumulator is situated upstream, whereas PCI is dominant for the other two locations.  Appreciable confinement of bubbles in individual channels is shown to promote rapid axial bubble growth.  The study shows significant variations in the amount of vapor generated and dominant flow patterns among channels, a clear manifestation of PCI, especially for low mass velocities and high heat fluxes.  It is also shown effects of the heat sink’s instabilities are felt in other components of the flow loop.  The parametric trends for PCI are investigated with the aid of three different types of stability maps which show different abilities at demarcating stable and unstable operations.  PDO shows severe pressure oscillations across the micro-channel heat sink, with rapid bubble growth and confinement, elongated bubble expansion in both directions, flow stagnation, and flow reversal (including vapor backflow to the inlet plenum) constituting the principal sequence of events characterizing the instability.  Spectral analysis of pressure signals is performed using Fast Fourier Transform, which shows PDO extending the inlet pressure fluctuations with the same dominant frequency to other upstream flow loop components, with higher amplitudes closer to the pump exit.  From a practical system operation point of view, throttling the flow upstream of the heat sink eliminates PDO but renders PCI dominant, and placing the accumulator in the liquid flow segment of the loop between the condenser and pump ensures the most stable operation.</p>

<p dir="ltr">As aircraft engine manufacturers continue to embark on their pursuit of higher-efficiency, lower-emissions gas turbines, a prevailing theme in the industry has been the increase of the engine bypass ratio. As the optimization space for engine bypass ratios trends towards smaller and smaller engine core sizes, the feasibility of centrifugal compressors as the final stage in an axial-centrifugal compressor becomes apparent due to their performance advantages at smaller scales.</p><p dir="ltr">This study performed an investigation into the aerodynamics of a stationary diffusion system intended for use with a final stage aeroengine centrifugal compressor using experimental and numerical techniques. Experimental work was performed at the Purdue Compressor Research Lab at Purdue University’s Maurice J. Zucrow Laboratories. Data were collected from several iterations of rapidly prototyped, additively manufactured diffuser and deswirl parts with internal instrumentation features. Furthermore, computational work on the stage was conducted using the Ansys Turbosystem.</p><p dir="ltr">The goal of this research is to identify trends in stationary diffusion system designs and the geometric features that cause them. Furthermore, the ability of steady computational fluid dynamics methods to predict these changes was evaluated using two turbulence models to produce a simulation of the compressor flow field. When used in conjunction with one another, the efficient use of computational methods to identify an optimal design and rapid prototyping to validate it leads to the determination of the best diffusion system design at a lower cost and time requirement than what is otherwise currently possible.</p><p dir="ltr">The different geometries which were tested identified the negative effects of spanwise vane contouring on the diffuser performance and the ability of endwall divergence to augment the pressure recovery performance of a design at the expense of increased losses. A full understanding of the effect of each design parameter is enabled by iterative inclusion or exclusion of certain design parameters. Furthermore, the use of computational fluid dynamics showed that the BSLEARSM turbulence model performs reasonably well in predicting the build-to-build performance trends. However, neither the BSLEARSM nor the SST turbulence model were able to accurately identify performance trends for the deswirl. For this reason, additional work is warranted to identify an optimal set of parameters to characterize the high axial and meridional turning present in this component.</p>

<p dir="ltr">With increasing power densities in electronic devices, effective thermal management has become an indispensable aspect of electronic systems design. Although phase change materials (PCMs) have been studied as a potential solution, their integration into microelectronic and high-power devices presents a significant challenge due to low thermal conductivity and lack of effective thermal pathways from the heat source to the heat sink. While much work has focused on integrating thermal storage into heat sinks, this dissertation instead investigates integrating PCMs between the heat source and the heat sink in different configurations. By placing the energy storage closer to the heat source, the thermal resistance is reduced, which improves the overall thermal performance of the device. Specifically, this work explores the efficacy of two approaches: (1) direct embedding of a PCM within the die for mobile electronics applications and (2) integration of an auxiliary composite PCM/copper thermal energy storage (TES) component in combination with active liquid cooling for high-power power electronics modules.</p><p><br></p><p dir="ltr">The first study explores die-level thermal management for microelectronics using PCMs. Silicon chips with PCM embedded within the die are modeled using ParaPower, a fast-analysis tool, and a genetic algorithm is used to efficiently optimize the distribution of high-conductivity silicon pathways and high thermal capacitance PCM zones. A thermal test vehicle (TTV) of a realistic microelectronics form factor with an embedded PCM layer is first designed, and a process is developed to fabricate such a TTV. This study is the first to successfully fabricate a TTV with fully encapsulated PCM and validate its thermal response across various operational scenarios. For temperature cycling tests (where the TTV temperature fluctuates between predetermined hot and cold setpoints), the embedded-PCM TTVs extend the operational time by up to 2.8x compared to a baseline all-silicon TTV. For duty cycling tests (with a fixed duration of the periodic heating pulses and off times), the embedded-PCM TTVs suppress the hotspot temperature rise by up to 14% and stabilize quasi-steady state temperature fluctuations by up to 65% through repeated PCM melting and solidification cycles. Thermal performance enhancements are observed even for high heat fluxes of ~65W/cm² . Specifically, a TTV with an embedded square-shaped PCM reservoir reduces temperature instability by an average of 40% across a range of cycle durations.</p><p><br></p><p dir="ltr">The second study investigates the effectiveness of different integration strategies for an auxiliary composite PCM/copper TES block integrated alongside a cold plate, for thermal management of high-power power electronics modules, specifically for electric vehicles. These systems are evaluated for realistic drive cycles of various driving intensities. Computational results indicate that this approach is most effective when the composite TES block is positioned directly above the heat-generating silicon carbide dies. This configuration excels at stabilizing transient temperature fluctuations and absorbing thermal shocks, achieving reductions of up to approximately ~33% compared to current thermal management techniques. This strategy is particularly effective for stop-and-go drive cycles characterized by high rates of acceleration and deceleration, low average driving speeds, and frequent stops, typical of driving schedules for public transport buses and mail delivery vehicles.</p><p><br></p><p dir="ltr">The results from both thermal management approaches demonstrate that the integration of a PCM cooling solution in close proximity to the heat source can significantly enhance its effectiveness by absorbing power bursts and limiting temperature instability via repeated melting and solidification. The contributions of this dissertation include the development of an effective optimization strategy for generating optimized PCM distributions, which reduces the maximum temperature and temperature oscillations in a device with significant computational efficiency. (The same optimization strategy can be applied to other thermal management design challenges.) Notably, TTVs of realistic microelectronics form factors with embedded PCM were designed, modeled, fabricated, and validated. With the PCM thermal buffers, the engineered solution demonstrated superior performance compared to a baseline all-silicon TTV. The second study into the integration of composite PCM/copper TES blocks into high-power power electronics modules established trade-offs between different architectures across various performance metrics, and highlighted its effectiveness for drive cycles with varying intensities. These findings offer an important contribution to the development of embedded thermal management techniques for electronic systems design, which will be critical for the advancement of next-generation microelectronics and high-power devices.</p>

The main objective of this study is to explore the complex fluid flow phenomena that result in the generation of a high frequency noise in counterbalance valves through an experimental and numerical investigation of the flow. Once the influence of the different components involved in noise generation is established, a secondary objective is the introduction of design modifications that eliminate the undesired effect without altering the operation envelope or the performance of the valve. A hydraulic test bench was used to carry out an experimental investigation of the noise generation process. A computer based data acquisition system was used to record pressure fluctuations, flowrates and hydraulic oil temperatures in a production valve under a variety of operational conditions. Extensive experimental measurements and numerical modeling lead to the hypothesis that noise generation is the result of an acoustic resonance triggered by shear layer instability at the valve inlet. The pressure gradients developed when the shear layer entrains the stagnant fluid in the valve main cavity cause the layer to become unstable and oscillate. The oscillation frequency will depend on a great number of factors such as valve geometry, pressure and velocity gradients and the density and viscosity of the fluid. It is postulated that the observed noise is generated when this frequency matches one of the resonant frequencies of the valve cavity. The proposed mechanism is theoretically poorly understood and well beyond simplified analysis, its accurate numerical simulation is computational very intensive requiring sophisticated CFD codes. The numerical investigation was carried out using STAR–CCM+, a commercially available CFD code featuring 3-D capabilities and sophisticated turbulence modeling. Streamline, pressure, velocity-vector and velocity-scalar plots were obtained for several valve configurations using steady and unsteady state flow simulations. An experimental and numerical analysis of an alternative valve geometry was carried out. Experimental results demonstrated a greatly reduced instability range. The numerical analysis of the unsteady behavior of the shear-layer streamlines for both valves yielded results that were compatible with the experimental work. The results of this investigation promise a great positive impact on the design of this type of hydraulic valves.

Lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) has been developed as a powerful numerical approach to simulate the complex fluid flow and heat transfer phenomena during the past two decades. As a mesoscale method based on the kinetic theory, LBM has several advantages compared with traditional numerical methods such as physical representation of microscopic interactions, dealing with complex geometries and highly parallel nature. Lattice Boltzmann method has been applied to solve various fluid behaviors and heat transfer process like conjugate heat transfer, magnetic and electric field, diffusion and mixing process, chemical reactions, multiphase flow, phase change process, non-isothermal flow in porous medium, microfluidics, fluid-structure interactions in biological system and so on. In addition, as a non-body-conformal grid method, the immersed boundary method (IBM) could be applied to handle the complex or moving geometries in the domain. The immersed boundary method could be coupled with lattice Boltzmann method to study the heat transfer and fluid flow problems. Heat transfer and fluid flow are solved on Euler nodes by LBM while the complex solid geometries are captured by Lagrangian nodes using immersed boundary method. Parallel computing has been a popular topic for many decades to accelerate the computational speed in engineering and scientific fields. Today, almost all the laptop and desktop have central processing units (CPUs) with multiple cores which could be used for parallel computing. However, the cost of CPUs with hundreds of cores is still high which limits its capability of high performance computing on personal computer. Graphic processing units (GPU) is originally used for the computer video cards have been emerged as the most powerful high-performance workstation in recent years. Unlike the CPUs, the cost of GPU with thousands of cores is cheap. For example, the GPU (GeForce GTX TITAN) which is used in the current work has 2688 cores and the price is only 1,000 US dollars. The release of NVIDIA's CUDA architecture which includes both hardware and programming environment in 2007 makes GPU computing attractive. Due to its highly parallel nature, lattice Boltzmann method is successfully ported into GPU with a performance benefit during the recent years. In the current work, LBM CUDA code is developed for different fluid flow and heat transfer problems. In this dissertation, lattice Boltzmann method and immersed boundary method are used to study natural convection in an enclosure with an array of conduting obstacles, double-diffusive convection in a vertical cavity with Soret and Dufour effects, PCM melting process in a latent heat thermal energy storage system with internal fins, mixed convection in a lid-driven cavity with a sinusoidal cylinder, and AC electrothermal pumping in microfluidic systems on a CUDA computational platform. It is demonstrated that LBM is an efficient method to simulate complex heat transfer problems using GPU on CUDA.

This thesis presents a GPU accelerated implementation of a high order splitting scheme with a spectral element discretization for the incompressible Navier Stokes (INS) equations. While others have implemented this scheme on clusters of processors using the Nek5000 code, to my knowledge this thesis is the first to explore its performance on the GPU. This work implements several of the Nek5000 algorithms using OpenCL kernels that efficiently utilize the GPU memory architecture, and achieve massively parallel on chip computations. These rapid computations have the potential to significantly enhance computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations that arise in areas such as weather modeling or aircraft design procedures. I present convergence results for several test cases including channel, shear, Kovasznay, and lid-driven cavity flow problems, which achieve the proven convergence results.

In order to explain the observed time-dependent salinity variations in seafloor hydrothermal vent fluids, quasi-numerical and fully numerical fluid flow models of the NaCl-H2O system are constructed. For the quasi-numerical model, a simplified treatment of phase separation of seawater near an igneous dike is employed to obtain rough estimates of the thickness and duration of the two-phase zone, the amount of brine formed, and its distribution in the subsurface. For the fully numerical model, the equations governing fluid flow, the thermodynamic relations between various quantities employed, and the coupling of these elements together in a time marching scheme is discussed. The fully numerical model is benchmarked against previously published heat pipe and Elder problem simulation results, and is shown to be largely in agreement with those results. A number of simulation results are presented in the context of two-phase flow and phase separation within the framework of the single pass model. It is found that a quasi-stable two-phase (liquid + vapor) zone at depth below the hydrothermal discharge outlet gives rise to vent fluid with lower than normal seawater salinity. Additionally, it is shown that increasing the spatial extent of the two-phase zone can lower vent fluid salinity. The numerical approach used in this thesis is able to generate salinity patterns predicted by a widely held conceptual model of vent fluid salinity variation, and may be able to explain the vent fluid salinities and temperatures found at the Main Endeavour Vent Field on the Juan de Fuca Ridge, as this approach is able to produce simulated vent fluid salinities that match observed values from the Endeavour Field vents Dante and Hulk.

A Web-server farm is a specialized facility designed specifically for housing Web servers catering to one or more Internet facing Web sites. In this dissertation, stochastic dynamic programming technique is used to obtain the optimal admission control policy with different classes of customers, and stochastic uid- ow models are used to compute the performance measures in the network. The two types of network traffic considered in this research are streaming (guaranteed bandwidth per connection) and elastic (shares available bandwidth equally among connections). We first obtain the optimal admission control policy using stochastic dynamic programming, in which, based on the number of requests of each type being served, a decision is made whether to allow or deny service to an incoming request. In this subproblem, we consider a xed bandwidth capacity server, which allocates the requested bandwidth to the streaming requests and divides all of the remaining bandwidth equally among all of the elastic requests. The performance metric of interest in this case will be the blocking probability of streaming traffic, which will be computed in order to be able to provide Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees. Next, we obtain bounds on the expected waiting time in the system for elastic requests that enter the system. This will be done at the server level in such a way that the total available bandwidth for the requests is constant. Trace data will be converted to an ON-OFF source and fluid- flow models will be used for this analysis. The results are compared with both the mean waiting time obtained by simulating real data, and the expected waiting time obtained using traditional queueing models. Finally, we consider the network of servers and routers within the Web farm where data from servers flows and merges before getting transmitted to the requesting users via the Internet. We compute the waiting time of the elastic requests at intermediate and edge nodes by obtaining the distribution of the out ow of the upstream node. This out ow distribution is obtained by using a methodology based on minimizing the deviations from the constituent in flows. This analysis also helps us to compute waiting times at different bandwidth capacities, and hence obtain a suitable bandwidth to promise or satisfy the QoS guarantees. This research helps in obtaining performance measures for different traffic classes at a Web-server farm so as to be able to promise or provide QoS guarantees; while at the same time helping in utilizing the resources of the server farms efficiently, thereby reducing the operational costs and increasing energy savings.

<p>The fluid flow in the mold during up-hill teeming is of great importance for the quality of the cast ingot and therefore the quality of the final steel products. At the early stage of the filling of an up-hill teeming mold, liquid steel enters, with high velocity, from the runner into the mold and the turbulence on the meniscus could lead to entrainment of mold flux. The entrained mold flux might subsequently end up as defects in the final product. It is therefore very important to get a mild and stable inlet flow in the entrance region of the mold. It has been acknowledged recently that swirling motion induced using a helix shaped swirl blade, in the submerged entry nozzle is remarkably effective to control the fluid flow pattern in both the slab and billet type continuous casting molds. This result in increased productivity and quality of the produced steel. Due to the result with continuous casting there is reason to investigate the swirling effect for up-hill teeming, a casting method with similar problem with turbulence.</p><p>With this thesis we will study the effect of swirling flow generated through a swirl blade inserted into the entry nozzle, as a new method of reducing the deformation of the rising surface and the unevenness of the flow during filling of the up-hill teeming mold. The swirling blade has two features: (1) to generate a swirling flow in the entrance nozzle and (2) to suppress the uneven flow, generated/developed after flowing through the elbow. The effect of the use of a helix shaped swirl blade was studied using both numerical calculations and physical modelling. Water modelling was used to assert the effect of the swirling blade on rectifying of tangential and axial velocities in the filling tube for the up-hill teeming and also to verify the results from the numerical calculations. The effect of swirl in combination with diverged nozzle was also investigated in a similar way, i. e. with water model trials and numerical calculations.</p>

This thesis aims to provide a better understanding of the role of mountain building in the carbon cycle. The amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere due to metamorphic processes is largely unknown. To constrain the quantity of CO2 released, fluid-driven reactions in metamorphic rocks can be studied by tracking fluid-rock interactions along ancient fluid flow pathways. The thesis is divided into two parts: 1) modeling of fluid flow rates and durations within shear zones and fractures during greenschist- and blueschist-facies metamorphism and 2) the assessment of possible mechanisms of fluid infiltration into rocks during greenschist- to epidote-amphibolite-facies metamorphism and controlling chemical and mineralogical factors of reaction front propagation. On the island Syros, Greece, fluid-rock interaction was examined along a shear zone and within brittle fractures to calculate fluid flux rates, flow velocities and durations. Petrological, geochemical and thermodynamic evidence show that the flux of CO2-bearing fluids along the shear zone was 100-2000 times larger than the fluid flux in the surrounding rocks. The time-averaged fluid flow velocity and flow duration along brittle fractures was calculated by using a governing equation for one-dimensional transport (advection and diffusion) and field-based parameterization. This study shows that fluid flow along fractures on Syros was rapid and short lived. Mechanisms and controlling factors of fluid infiltration were studied in greenschist- to epidote-amphibolite-facies metabasalts in SW Scotland. Fluid infiltration into metabasaltic sills was unassisted by deformation and occurred along grain boundaries of hydrous minerals (e.g. amphibole) while other minerals (e.g. quartz) prevent fluid infiltration. Petrological, mineralogical and chemical studies of the sills show that the availability of reactant minerals and mechanical factors, e.g. volume change in epidote, are primary controls of reaction front propagation. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 2: Manuscript. Paper 3: Manuscript. Paper 4: Manuscript.</p><p> </p>