CEEE Postdoc Appointed to University of Texas Faculty

CEEE researcher Andrew Fix has been appointed assistant professor at The University of Texas (UT) at Austin’s Maseeh Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering. Fix will complete his yearlong postdoctoral position at CEEE this month, before heading south to the Lone Star State for his new tenure-track position. He will also hold a courtesy appointment in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Fix joined CEEE in December 2023 after earning his doctorate in mechanical engineering from Purdue University. While Fix’s time at CEEE was relatively short, his impact was large. He served in a leadership role in CEEE’s Energy Efficiency and Heat Pumps consortium, and his achievements include designing and building a test facility for a two-chamber wood-drying heat pump that could help green the construction sector. Fix embraced the hands-on work.

“I designed duct work, installed heat exchangers, air flow nozzles and flow mixers,” he says. “I was bolting things together, cutting things apart, improvising on-the-fly to build our wood drying heat exchanger test facility.” As a future faculty member, Fix benefited from the experience of overseeing the undergraduate interns who assisted him in building the test facility and guiding graduate students in conducting research.

Fix also honed his theoretical understanding of vapor compression cycles. “CEEE gave me a strong foundation to understand and study heat pump systems,” he says. “I really learned to ‘speak the language’ of heat pump and refrigeration research. Coming away with a better sense of the current state-of-the-art and research needs in the field of heat pumps is invaluable and really sets me up to provide my own unique contributions to the field.” He notes that CEEE Director Reinhard Radermacher, Co-Directors Yunho Hwang and Vikrant Aute and Senior Faculty Specialist Jan Jan Muehlbauer were all instrumental in his success.

At UT Austin, Fix’s research will focus on the intersection of water and energy in the built environment. The work will concentrate on dehumidification, cooling, thermal energy storage, atmospheric water harvesting technologies and materials, with an emphasis on their application in buildings.

Published December 5, 2024