Konstantin I. Matveev - US grants

0853171
Matveev


This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).

A promising candidate for compact electricity generation and refrigeration is a thermoacoustic engine integrated with a heat source and an electroacoustic transformer. Thermoacoustic systems are environmentally friendly, highly reliable due to their simple structure involving a minimal number of moving parts, and potentially highly efficient. The general objectives of this project are to understand the fundamentals of oscillatory gas thermodynamics and heat transfer in miniature enclosures, to develop efficient solutions for small scale energy conversion, and to advance education in high performance energy systems.

Intellectual Merit: There is evidence that use of tortuous porous materials as stacks or regenerators in thermoacoustic devices can raise the efficiency of small scale thermoacoustic systems. To understand the oscillatory gas thermodynamics and heat transfer, and implement miniature devices with high performance, fundamental research is required that addresses several problems important in small scale systems. These problems include thermoacoustic transport in tortuous porous media, strong non uniformity of acoustic and temperature fields in the system elements, mitigation of viscous and thermal losses, and coupling with small heat sources and electroacoustic transformers. The research involves graduate and undergraduate students and focuses on: (1) analytical and numerical analysis of small scale thermoacoustic phenomena, (2) macroscale experiments under conditions specific to small scale systems, and (3) small scale tests with optimized miniature thermoacoustic devices.

Broader Impacts: The development of compact thermoacoustic energy conversion devices will enable implementation of a variety of small scale systems, such as MEMS, sensor networks, and unmanned vehicles. Thermoacoustic systems can also be used for waste heat recovery and conversion. Improved understanding of thermoacoustics at small scales will benefit emerging biomedical applications, such as thermoacoustic tomography and therapy. The educational plan related to the research will improve the quality of undergraduate and graduate education in the energy area. This will be done by integrating research into curricula and developing workshops for summer schools. Students from underrepresented groups will be recruited as research assistants. Research results and education innovations will be disseminated through publications, the internet, and in short courses during summer schools.

This project will investigate the dynamics of novel air-assisted marine vehicles that include energy-efficient air-cavity hulls and fast amphibious platforms. The dynamics of these vehicles is very complex due to unsteady phenomena in compliant air zones between hulls and water and high-speed body motions near the air-sea interface. The main research goals are to derive and investigate dynamical systems for vehicle motions and to establish methods for determining static and dynamic stability, motions in waves and transient regimes, and effective control approaches. The scope of this work include derivation of mathematical models for vehicle dynamics, determination of forces with help of simplified modeling, detailed computational simulations, and experiments, and validation of theoretical findings on scaled experimental models of air-assisted marine vehicles.

This research will provide understanding on how to design and control novel sea-going air-assisted marine vehicles with exceptional efficiency and speed characteristics. Cargo ships will benefit from air cavity systems that can decrease drag by up to 30 percent. Reductions in underwater noise and wake wash will be additional environmentally friendly by-products. Ultra-fast heavy-lift amphibious craft with speeds well above 100 mph will provide efficient transportation means for Arctic regions and for rescue and security operations in oceans and on islands. Obtained research results will be broadly disseminated and integrated into existing and new courses and summer schools. Demonstrator models of advanced marine vehicles will provide an effective means to recruit students to careers in engineering.

This three year REU Site award at Washington State University (WSU) entitled "Introduction to Multiscale Engineering, is dedicated to using modern processing, modeling and analysis techniques to understand the relationships between the structure and properties at various length scales spanning the spectrum from the atomic scale to the macroscopic scale. Ten undergraduate students will participate each summer in individual projects over the course of 10 weeks. A group of 9 faculty members in the College of Engineering and Architecture at WSU will be dedicated to mentoring and research supervision. Each project will introduce the student to basic concepts in multiscale engineering and, thus, each project will include components (experimental and/or analytical and numerical) that deal with at least two different length scales. Students will work with a team including faculty, post docs and graduate students on projects such as multiscale models of materials behavior, discrete particle simulation of granular materials, collective behavior of carbon nanotubes, mechanical behavior of sheet metals under dynamic loading, modeling and simulation of microfluidic fuel cells, thermoacoustic electricity generators, scaling of hydrogenic twin-screw extruders for the fueling of fusion energy machines, fabrication and characterization of thermal interface materials, scaling issues in resonant heat engines, and multiscale effects in composite laminates.

This REU Site program will provide a research experience for a diverse group of students, ranging from ethnicity, gender, academic, and economic backgrounds. Recruitment efforts will focus on students from demographic groups traditionally underrepresented in engineering and science, students from schools that have limited research, and students who are 1st and 2nd year undergraduates who are often not given research opportunities. The goal for this REU site is to increase participation by underrepresented groups from the current 45% to over 50%. In particular, the program will increase participation by Hispanic students through mentoring programs. By actively recruiting students who have finished their first and second years, the program aims to attract students to engineering who otherwise might have changed majors later in their undergraduate studies. This strategy is designed to attract and retain students from many disciplines of engineering and science to careers in multiscale science and engineering.

To address climate change, Humanity must reduce reliance on fossil fuels and find alternative ways to generate energy for industry, transportation, and consumers. Hydrogen, when produced using renewable energy sources, is considered as one of the most promising fuels for the future, and does not emit harmful pollutants when reacting with oxygen. However, being the lightest element, hydrogen in the gaseous form requires large containers for storage and is considered impractical for many applications. Liquid hydrogen is a very attractive compact energy source, but it can exist only at very low temperatures. Current cooling techniques for both liquefaction and storage of hydrogen are rather inefficient. To help make the hydrogen economy viable, a potentially efficient novel acoustic method for coupled cooling-conversion of cryogenic hydrogen is explored of this project. The accompanying educational and outreach activities aim at improving engineering education by developing materials for energy-related courses, summer programs for K-12 students, professional short courses, and a textbook on cryogenic hydrogen systems.<br/><br/>The necessary steps to prepare hydrogen for liquefaction and subsequent storage in the low energy state include cryogenic cooling and spin-conversion. These processes can be potentially combined by employing thermoacoustic heat pumping in a porous matrix which will also serve as a catalytic bed, accelerating conversion of flowing orthohydrogen into parahydrogen. The exploration of this combined process and associated thermal transport, fluid flow, quantum transitions, dynamic regimes, and system engineering constitutes the intellectual significance of the proposed research. Modeling efforts will include development of a reduced-order framework for analysis of thermoacoustic-catalytic systems for cooling cryogenic hydrogen and setting up high-fidelity computational simulations, while incorporating models from different scientific and technical areas. Experimental systems will be designed, built, and tested for analysis validation and practical demonstrations of novel methods for cooling cryogenic hydrogen. Results and products generated in this project will help establish methods for practical design of efficient cryogenic hydrogen-based energy systems.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.