Abolfazl Sadeghpour and Zezhi Zeng won first place in the NSF poster competition at the IMECE Conference, for the poster titled “Effect of Nozzle Geometry on Instability of Wetted Wire Columns.” The competition was held November 15, 2016, in Phoenix, Arizona. Sadeghpour and Zeng are Mechanical Engineering graduate students working in Professor Sungtaek Ju’s Lab.
Sadeghpour’s and Zeng’s research focuses on an innovative design for improving the efficiency of Heat/Mass exchangers. Large-scale evaporative cooling is one of the leading sources of fresh water consumption. Dry cooling based on existing heat exchangers, however, has found limited usage due to the high cost and large foot prints/weights. Thus, development of alternative low-cost lightweight heat exchangers for dry cooling is urgently needed and has the potential to make a difference. One promising design for such alternative heat exchangers is what we call DIrect-contact Liquid-on-String Heat Exchangers (DILSHE). Fluid Dynamics and Heat Transfer are the critical aspects of this design. The poster focused on the Fluid Dynamics of DILSHE and the first systematic study to confirm, both experimentally and numerically, the effect of nozzle geometry on flow regime of the liquid flowing down the string as well as the efficiency of the system.