Ronggui Yang, iMINT Researcher and assistant professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU-Boulder), was honored by ASME for developing modeling and experimental tools to understand micro/nanoscale effects on thermal transport and for innovative applications of micro/nanostructures in macroscale forms for energy conversion and thermal management. He received the Bergles-Rohsenow Young Investigator Award in Heat Transfer.
The award, established in 2003, recognizes a young engineer who is committed to pursuing research in heat transfer, and has demonstrated the potential to make substantial contributions to this field. It was presented to Dr. Yang during the 14th International Heat Transfer Conference, which was held in Washington, D.C., August 8-13.
An assistant professor of mechanical engineering at CU-Boulder, Yang is also the Sanders Faculty Fellow in engineering and the director of the Nano-enabled Energy Conversion, Storage, and Thermal Management Systems (NEXT) group.
Yang joined CU-Boulder in January 2006 after earning his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, with a focus on nanoscale heat transfer, under the guidance of Professor Gang Chen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge. Together with Professor Chen and Professor Mildred Dresselhaus, Yang developed the Boltzmann transport equation based models to describe thermal and electron transport in nanocomposites when the conventional Fourier's and Ohm's laws are not applicable and proposed nanocomposites as high-efficiency and low-cost thermoelectric materials.
His current research interests are on developing multiscale modeling/simulation tools and experimental methods to understand nanoscale transport phenomena and on the utilization of micro/nano-scale effects in heat transfer for large-scale energy conversion and thermal management systems.
Yang has published 40 journal papers and delivered about 40 invited conference and seminar talks. He has also presented or co-authored another 60 conference talks/proceedings. According to the ISI Web of Science, his journal papers are well cited, with citations exceeding 200 per year. He holds two patents, with five pending.
An ASME member, Yang serves on the Heat Transfer Division's technical committees, as well as ASME Nanotechnology Institute's Nanoscale Phenomena Committee. He is a referee for manuscripts submitted to ASME journals and conferences, and has served as a track/symposium organizer and session chair for a number of ASME conferences.
His numerous honors include a CAREER Award (2009) from the National Science Foundation, a Young Faculty Award (2008) from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an MIT Technology Review's TR35 Award (2008) and a Goldsmid Award (2005) from the ITS. He also won the Dean's Award for the Outstanding Junior Faculty Member from the College of Engineering in 2010 and the Outstanding Research Award from the mechanical engineering department at CU-Boulder in 2008. Yang was one of 88 of the nation's brightest young engineers selected to take part in the National Academy of Engineering's 15th annual U.S. Frontiers of Engineering symposium in 2009.
Prior to earning his Ph.D., Yang received a bachelor's degree in thermal engineering at Xi'an Jiaotong University, China, in 1996; a master's degree in engineering thermophysics at Tsinghua University (Beijing, China) in 1999; and a master's degree in mechanical engineering (micro-electro-mechanical systems) at the University of California at Los Angeles in 2001.
More >>iMINT Researcher, Ronggui Yang, has been awarded the 2010 ASME Bergles-Rohsenow Young Investigator Award in Heat Transfer. The citation for the award:
For developing modeling and experimental tools to understand micro/nanoscale thermal transport and for innovative applications of micro/nano-structure in macroscale forms for energy conversion and thermal management.
Formal presentation of the award is scheduled to take place at the 14th International Heat Transfer Conference, August 7-13, 2010, in DC.
More >>A team of nanotechnology researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University has used friction force microscopy to determine the nanoscale frictional characteristics of four atomically-thin materials, discovering a universal characteristic for these very different materials. Friction across these thin sheets increases as the number of atomic layers decreases, all the way down to one layer of atoms. This friction increase was surprising as there previously was no theory to predict this behavior.
More >>University of Colorado Research Associate, Mark Siemens, is the lead author on a soon-to-be published paper in Nature Materials. The paper, entitled 'Quasi-ballistic thermal transport from nanoscale interfaces observed using ultrafast coherent soft X-ray beams', demonstrates findings that could have significant impact on the thermal management and reliability of emerging nanoscale devices. iMINT faculty researcher Ronggui Yang along with CU's Qing Li, Margaret Murnane and Henry Kapteyn, Keith Nelson of MIT, and Erik Anderson of the Lawrence Berkeley Labs and Center for X-Ray Optics also contributed to the article.
Professor Se-Hee Lee and his team of collaborators at NREL were awarded a 2009 R&D 100 Award for their invention for the PowerPlane UX Microbattery - a solid-state thin-film battery. This award recognizes the 100 most technologically significant products introduced the past year. The winning of an R&D 100 Award provides a mark of excellence known to industry, government, and academia as proof that the product is one of the most innovative ideas of the year. R&D 100 Award winners are selected by an independent judging panel and the editors of R&D Magazine. The publication and its online portal serve research scientists, engineers, and other technical staff members at high tech industrial companies and public and private laboratories around the world. Professor Lee and his team will be recognized at the R&D 100 Awards Banquet on Nov. 12, 2009, in Orlando.
The iMINT Center has added another new industrial sponsor. iMINT is happy to welcome Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), a research center with wide-ranging research interests.
More >>Assistant Professor Ronggui Yang has been awarded an NSF CAREER award. His 5-year $400K CAREER project seeks to advance research and education programs in nanoscale thermal transport: to develop an integrative experimental and simulation program including a novel high throughput, high spatiotemporal resolution photo-thermal microscope to study thermal transport processes in innovative materials and devices that are critical to microelectronics and energy technologies and to educate the public about what nanotechnology can do and cannot do in various thermal and energy applications. CAREER is NSF's most prestigious award in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research.
Congratulations to Harold S. Park and Sung Youb Kim for publishing a new
paper, in Physical Review Letters, Utilizing Mechanical Strain to
Mitigate the Intrinsic Loss Mechanisms in Oscillating Metal Nanowires.
Visit
here to see recent publications by other
iMiNT Researchers.
iMINT has recently added Foster-Miller, Inc. as a sponsor. "Foster-Miller, Inc., is a technology and product development company with an international reputation for delivering and supporting innovative products and systems that perform under the most demanding conditions. Our TALON robots and LAST Armor are both used worldwide to better protect our armed forces."
Click here for a list of our current sponsorsMore >>Engineers and scientists at the U. of Texas/Austin have achieved a breakthrough in the use of graphene as a new carbon-based material for storing electrical charge in ultracapacitor devices, perhaps paving the way for the massive installation of renewable energies such as wind and solar power.
More >> Ronggui Yang, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has been named one of the world's top 35 young innovators in the September/October issue of Technology Review, a magazine published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Known as the TR35, the honored group consists of 35 scientists and technologists under the age of 35 whose work is said to be changing the world in the fields of medicine, computing, communications, electronics, nanotechnology and energy.
Yang, 34, works in the areas of micro- and nanotechnology for energy conversion, thermal management in electronic devices, and nanostructured materials.
"Professor Ronggui Yang is a shining example of the type of outstanding young faculty we have been able to attract here at CU-Boulder," said Chancellor G.P. "Bud" Peterson. "His fundamental work in thermal processes, coupled with his work in energy conversion play an important role in the CU Energy Initiative and will help us define a path forward as we move into the 'new energy' age."
Yang is a key figure in several large research grants to CU-Boulder, including a recently announced $1.5 million contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, to demonstrate new micro- and nanotechnologies that will significantly improve thermal management in electronic devices -- one of the critical constraints on today's consumer and military electronic systems.
He also has an ongoing grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to research energy harvesting and storage systems, including new thermoelectric materials with nanoscale components that could convert waste heat from engines and high-power electronics to boost fuel efficiency.
Yang received his doctorate in mechanical engineering from MIT and joined the faculty at CU-Boulder in January 2006. He is a member of the DARPA Focus Center on Nanoscale Science and Technology for Micro/Nano-Electromechanical Transducers and the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center for Extreme Ultraviolet Science and Technology.
He is the recipient of a DARPA 2008 Young Faculty Award for his innovations in microsystems technology, the International Thermoelectric Society's 2005 Goldsmid Award for research excellence, and a 2004 NASA Certificate of Recognition for technical innovation, among other honors. He has seven patents pending on nanotechnology-enabled energy conversion and thermal management.
The TR35 will be honored at MIT's Emerging Technologies Conference to be held Sept. 23-25 in Cambridge, Mass. Yang has been invited to serve on an energy panel and give an overview of how his research will impact global energy use.
The complete list of this year's TR35 winners can be found at http://www.technologyreview.com/tr35.
More >>Once theorized as he strongest material on Earth, graphene - a single molecule thick sheet of graphite - has been systematically verified by Professor Jim Hone at Columbia University to have the most intrinsic strength of anything yet measured. In an article published in Science, Hone has shown that a defect-free lattice of graphene molecules, just one molecule thick, should be able to withstand forces of up to about 10 pounds per square meter - an amount previously unheard of for a material just a few nanometers thick.
More >>May 2008 -- A University of Colorado at Boulder research center has won a $1.5 million contract with its long-time partner Lockheed Martin Corp. to demonstrate new micro- and nanotechnologies that promise to significantly improve thermal management in electronic devices, one of the critical constraints on today's consumer and military electronic systems.
The initial 18-month contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, managed by Thomas Kenny of the Microsystems Technology Office, is for the first phase of an effort to demonstrate the feasibility of replacing the copper heat pipe that is common in electronics and space systems today with a thermal ground plane -- a common, underlying component of printed circuit boards -- made of flexible polymer materials.
The total value of the effort, if all phases of the development program are completed, could be up to $3.95 million over four years.
The concept developed by Assistant Professor Ronggui Yang at CU-Boulder has vastly superior ability to remove the heat generated in computers and cell phones, as well as in new generations of energy systems such as flexible solar cells and batteries where heat removal requirements have limited further improvements, according to Professor Y.C. Lee of mechanical engineering, who directs the DARPA Focus Center on Nanoscale Science and Technology for Integrated Micro/Nano-Electromechanical Transducers, or iMINT.
"Cooling is the No. 1 problem in electronics, and this represents a total paradigm shift," Lee said. "Flexible thermal ground planes have 100 times better thermal conductivity than copper and will enable a new generation of high-performance, integrated microelectronic, photonic or microwave systems operating at high power density without constraints resulting from complex thermal management solutions."
The research team plans to fabricate a thermal ground plane that is only 1 millimeter thick, which is comparable to a credit card but with an area as large as a laptop computer. The thermal ground plane can be used as a stand-alone component or integrated in a printed circuit board connecting chips and other components, according to Yang.
A smaller thermal ground plane could be fabricated in the same way for use in a device such as a cell phone. Or, since the polymer material is flexible, it could be folded back and forth in a stack configuration although this would be a greater challenge, Yang said.
The polymer ground plane will encase a nanoscale wicking structure in which distilled water is alternately vaporized and condensed, as in a more conventional heat pipe, to remove heat from a laser diode, a microprocessor or a transceiver. The polymer will be coated with alumina through atomic layer deposition to provide a vapor barrier, which will maintain the water for long-time operation.
The technological innovation came about in a "perfect storm" of research interests coming together at CU-Boulder. "We have every piece of the puzzle here," Lee said.
Three CU faculty members who joined the university in 2006 established the core concept for the novel thermal ground plane: Yang, who brought expertise in nanostructured materials and heat transfer; Professor and Chancellor G.P. "Bud" Peterson, a world expert in heat pipes; and Research Assistant Professor Chen Li, who contributed to the heat transfer modeling and design.
Their concept matched well with the technologies already developed by CU professors Steven George, who patented atomic layer deposition coating technology; Victor Bright, a micro- and nanotechnology expert with years of experience working with DARPA; and Lee, an expert in micro- and nanoscale manufacturing and packaging technologies. Except for George, who is based in chemistry and chemical engineering, all of the other team members are faculty in mechanical engineering.
Lockheed Martin also has been a long-time partner in the research, having provided the first seed grant to improve atomic layer deposition for hydrophobic coating in 2002, a technology that is essential to the proposed thermal ground plane. "Lockheed Martin considers it a unique opportunity to benefit from CU researchers and incorporate their innovative thermal management solutions into future aerospace systems," said Suraj Rawal, senior manager for research in advanced materials and structures at Lockheed Martin Space Systems.
iMINT, which was established in fall 2006 with a DARPA grant managed by Dennis Polla, attracted nearly $1.5 million in government and industrial funding in its first year of operation. With the new contract, the center's research activities will be expanded to more than $2.5 million per year.
"This new thermal ground plane contract is a good example of how fundamental research conducted at the DARPA iMINT center can stimulate new system-level research for real-world applications and how industry sponsors such as Lockheed Martin can benefit from the expanded activities," Lee said.
Additional industry sponsors are being sought to participate in the thermal ground plane development as well as other engineering research projects.
More >>Four new faculty in the mechanical engineering department at the
University of Colorado at Boulder have been selected to receive Young
Faculty Awards from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to
support innovative research in microsystems technology.
Assistant Professors Scott Bunch, Harold Park, Wei Tan and Ronggui Yang are among 39 "rising stars" selected for the awards at 27 universities across the country. Each will receive a grant of about $150,000 to develop and validate their research ideas during the coming year.
More >>iMINT just received another notice on March 14th, 2008 that it is getting a $300K DARPA seedling to demonstrate a new nanowire-based LED with an efficiency of 60% while running it at 100% duty cycle. With iMINT's current $1.5M/year base funding and thermal ground plane's $1.0M/year along with recent awards, we are well positioned to become the national resource center in nanotubes / nanowires / graphenes-enabled microsystems.
March 2008, a team of iMINT professors (Assistant Professor Ronggui Yang of Mechanical Engineering, Professor Kurt Maute of Aerospace Engineeing Sciences and Professor Martin Dunn of Mechanical Engineering) won a 3-year highly competitive AFOSR Discovery Challenge Thruster grant (BAA 2007-08). Yang's team will use the $600K to develop A Design Tool for Nanostructures with Tunable Thermal Properties.
4 CU faculty members applied for the 2008 DARPA/MTO Young Faculty Award. All 4 were selected to receive the award with a total of $600K for studies in thermoelectric, biosensors, graphene and nanoresonators. It is unprecedented for a single department with four awardees. Congratulations to Assistant Professor Ronggui Yang, Assistant Professor Wei Tan, Assistant Professor Harold Park, and Assitant Professor Scott Bunch.
2007 research study finds that 'High Q' NIST Nanowires May Be Practical Oscillators.
More >>The 3rd Annual IEEE International Conference on Nano/Micro Engineered and Molecular Systems.
January 6-9, 2008. Hainan Island, China.
More >>New Research from Kurt Maute, Martin L. Dunn and Ronggui Yang, National Science Foundation.
More >>New Research from Dr. Victor M. Bright, Co-PI: Dr. Steven M. George, University of Colorado at Boulder.
More >>Dr. Steve George's 3-year NSF renewal proposal, "Molecular Layer Deposition of Polymers: Nucleation, Surface Chemistry and Nanocomposite Films," was recently funded. This proposal will allow us to continue our work on developing new chemistry for the ALD of polymeric materials.
