Taehun Lee
CUNY City College, NY·Engineering
A thermal diode lets heat flow more easily in one direction than in the other, much as an electrical diode does for current. Efficient, fast and robust thermal diodes could improve thermal management and energy harvesting, and could enable new devices such as thermal logic gates.
- Fields
Engineering
Materials Science
Physics
- Topics
thermal diode
thermal rectification
heat transfer
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2027
What they work on
- Test whether capillary filling and emptying of liquid in structurally and materially heterogeneous nanostructures can make heat flow strongly in one direction, creating a nanoscale thermal diode.
- Study how condensation and evaporation transport heat through these nanostructures under opposite temperature gradients, using multiphysics, multiscale simulations combined with experiments.
- Determine whether the capillary thermal diode can switch heat flow without significant hysteresis at ambient conditions.
More about the research
Existing thermal diodes, however, do not separate the two directions strongly enough for many uses. Their rectification or switching ratio is too low.
Why it matters
Thermal diodes with a much higher switching ratio could make cooling of electronics and other thermal management more efficient, and could improve energy-harvesting systems. They might also enable new technologies such as thermal logic gates that process information with heat.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Xianfan Xu
Purdue University, IN·Engineering
Develop theory for how radiative heat transport by hyperbolic phonon polaritons, light-lattice vibration waves, inside hyperbolic materials depends on wavelength and temperature.
Xinpeng Zhao
Michigan State University, MI·Materials Science
Establish how moisture changes heat flow in cellulose-based porous materials by making samples with controlled fiber sizes and pore structures and measuring their thermal conductivity across humidity levels.
Sheila Edalatpour
University of Maine, ME·Engineering·Early-career
Establish a theoretical framework for modeling thermal radiation from quantum materials, whose atomic-scale electronic structure makes them radiate differently from bulk materials.
The school
CUNY City College: 9 labs on PI Pages, $72M a year on research, 31 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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