Research

The future of mobility relies heavily on secondary batteries, which are considered a vital part of our future sustenance. Among various aspects, the thermal and structural design of batteries is crucial for their continuous operation. Our laboratory is engaged in designing thermal systems for battery cooling and is focusing on realizing and optimizing such system based on the phase-change heat transfer. Additionally, we perform system-level design based on measured data according to the thermal load of batteries, putting efforts into developing next-generation cooling technologies for secondary batteries.

Future energy and mobility applications need a higher operating temperature for ultimate efficiency and performance. However, the higher operating temperature also requires extreme cooling techniques which cannot achieve the conventional techniques. Our group has researched advanced cooling configurations with 3d printing and phase change heat transfer with micro-nano structures that can achieve one order of higher heat transfer coefficient.

Thermal metamaterials lead to exotic properties for controlling radiative heat transfer. Our group has developed several kinds of thermal metamaterials to realize facile camouflage materials for IR stealth. Additionally, we measure and analyze the thermal-fluidic behaviors of mobility systems in a supersonic flowfield which validates the actual operating condition.

Enormous energy consumption based on fossil fuels leads to excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which induces the climate crisis in the world. In order to solve the climate crisis, we should advance the energy application eco-friendly. Our group has researched on the thermal design for clear energy application to carbon dioxide capture storage and nuclear fusion reactors.

In order to manipulate the heat transfer behavior, we should understand the fundamental thermal-fluidic behavior near the surface. However, due to the limit of measurements techniques, it is still challenging issues to understand the transport phenomena in the boundary layer. Our research group has studied on various kinds of transport phenomena. Especially, we developed the measurement system for measuring the thermophoretic behavior of colloidal particles which can help to increase in the heat transfer performance.