Oluwaferanmi ‘Feranmi’ Akinpelu is a master’s student and a graduate research assistant in the Advanced Heat Exchangers and Process Intensification

Before beginning graduate school at University of Maryland in 2015, Sevket Yuruker received his undergraduate degree in

Zhenyuan Mei’s thesis, Modeling of Mobile Conditioning Systems, involves the building of steady state and transient models for Mobile Air Conditioning system (MACs ). One of his tasks is comparing refrigerants to see which are most effective within a secondary loop system. He used Dymola for the transient model, and created a direct expansion system to set a benchmark. In Dymola, the heat exchangers are modeled using the finite volume method, and the compressor model is an efficiency based model. Mei began working on this project when he joined CEEE in 2015.

When Dongyu Chen started at CEEE in the summer of 2016, he was no stranger to working in a new environment. After receiving his bachelors degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, he moved to the United States to participate in the Mechanical Engineering Master’s program at University of Michigan.

Ellery Klein indicated he had an interest in working with CEEE since he learned about its existence.

“I thought, ‘This is what I want to do and it’s a really good lab’,” he said. “If you’re really interested in thermal engineering, this is the place to be.” Klein began his academic career at UMD in 2013, when he started as an undergraduate. He went on to earn his BS in Mechanical Engineering and started as a PhD student last fall.

Janel Niska, a Chicago-area native with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Iowa State University (‘15), is a first year mechanical engineering PhD student and graduate research assistant for the Center for Environmental Energy Engineering’s Energy Efficiency and Heat Pumps (EEHP) research group. 

Ph.D. student Zhenning Li has made great strides this semester, marked by his impressive academic performance and is currently working on a next generation heat exchanger. He uses CoilDesigner to create models while adopting several mathematic models and writing source code. After having spent the last two years polishing these skills, Li would like to find other ways to incorporate them into projects. As a parallel task, he is addressing refrigerant and air distribution for heat exchangers with Dr. Vikrant Aute.

Along with her team in the EEHP group, Yiyuan Qiao is working on RoCo, the Roving Comforter, a robotic personal cooling device. The device cools the surrounding environment according to an individual’s personal comfort. RoCo is equipped with facial recognition to help the unit direct airflow at its user, and it communicates using wifi with wearable technology that regulates the airflow and temperature according to the user’s changes in body temperature.

As a member of the Modeling and Optimization Consortium (MOC) group, James Tancabel is working on the Next Generation Heat Exchangers Project. The project aims to optimize air to fluid heat exchangers. Their focus is the air-side of the exchanger, “that’s where the thermal resistance is,” says Tancabel, although he adds that they also look into the mechanical aspects so they can look at the manufacturing side of it. “It’s a very open field,” he notes, there are a lot of researchers working on these kinds of heat exchangers, but, he adds, “there’s still a lot of work to be done.”

Before moving to the United States from India in 2015, Gargi Kailkhura studied at the National Institute of Technology, Surat (SVNIT), where she received a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering. With a keen interest in math and science, Gargi always knew she wanted to become an engineer.