Doctoral student Min Che and her advisor, Research Assistant Professor Stefan Elbel, earned a Best Paper Award at the 2019 HEFAT conference for their work, “Quantification of Local Air-side Heat Transfer Coefficient Using Color-change Coatings.”

Their paper won in the Air Conditioning and Refrigeration category at the conference, which was held in Wicklow, Ireland, July 22-24. 

Che and Elbel are developing a novel measurement technique to accurately quantify local air-side heat transfer coefficients for realistic heat transfer surfaces and geometries. Their new method is based on the analogy between heat and mass transfer and bears several substantial advantages over conventionally used methods in terms of accuracy and user-friendliness. The research is supported by the member companies of MechSE’s Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Center (ACRC), of which Elbel is an Associate Director.

The HEFAT conference presented the latest progress and developments in heat transfer, fluid mechanics, and thermodynamics from around the world, and brought together a wide range of research areas from narrow fundamental work in nanofluids to import applications in the broad fields of energy, manufacturing, biomedical processes, production, education, instrumentation and control, and MEMS.