Burt Tilley and Vadim Yakovlev
Professor Tilley, who serves as Principal Investigator (PI), heads up the award team also composed of Co-PIs WPI’s Assistant Teaching Professor/Research Associate Vadim Yakovlev and Assistant Professor Rebecca Webb from the Dept. Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. The award is for 3 years (9/15/2015-9/14/2018), for a total of $432,601.
The award’s abstract reads as follows: " We are interested in understanding how electromagnetic-radiation absorbing materials, either porous or designed with channels through which a coolant can flow, can be used to transfer the energy from electromagnetic radiation to a coolant. For the applications of interest, temperatures can reach 2000 K, and since the electrical conductivity of these materials depends on temperature, multiple steady temperatures are possible at the same input power. The research program centers on using asymptotic multi-scale methods including homogenization to formulate an effective-medium theory to describe the energy conservation and electric field amplitude propagation through this medium, for incompressible and compressible coolants. Results will be compared to GPU-accelerated finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) scripts in two spatial dimensions. Simulations in three dimensions will be done by implementing computational approaches from the 2D-FDTD schemes within a three-dimensional spatial framework in COMSOL Multi-physics.”