The Ohio State University

Abstract:
In this lecture the general world energy picture will be first briefly reviewed in terms of the projected needs of humanity in the 21st century and our dependence on fossil fuels. Based on these needs, novel concepts on energy conversion, transport and conservation, will be presented.  An important aspect for the development of such technologies is a solid understanding of the basic thermodynamics and transport phenomena in general, coupled with nanoscale engineering and interfacial phenomena. Specific results will be shown from the topic of transportable, surface driven, energy conversion in fuel cell - based micropowerplants with solid oxide as well as direct methanol fuel cells. From the area of efficient energy transport at the nanoscale, research results will be presented on the manufacturing of nanoelectronic devices with carbon nanotubes and graphene sheets.  The lecture will conclude with a discussion pertaining to the energy performance of information technology "data" centers. Fifty percent of the electrical energy consumption of large scale data centers comes from cooling needs. Given the strong upward trend of the role of information technology in our everyday life, there is an urgent need to rethink the design of computers and datacenters over a large span of length scales (from microchip to building) taking their energy consumption and CO2 footprint size into account. To this end, recent concepts and results on integrated liquid cooling of microchips with energy reuse leading to zero emission "green" data centers will be presented.

Bio:

Professor Dimos Poulikakos holds the Chair of Thermodynamics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland, where in 1996 he founded the Laboratory of Thermodynamics in Emerging Technologies in the Institute of Energy Technology. His current research is in the area of interfacial transport phenomena and thermodynamics in emerging technologies including phenomena at the micro- and nanoscales. Among the awards he has received for his contributions are the White House/NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1985 and he is the recipient of the 2000 James Harry Potter Gold Medal of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers for his contributions to thermodynamics and its applications in emerging technologies. He has published over 200 research articles in peer reviewed journals as well as numerous articles in reviewed proceedings of professional conferences and a graduate level textbook on Conduction Heat Transfer (Prentice Hall, 1994).