News and Highlights
Highlights
-
NSF CAREER Award
Date: 05/05/2021
Dr. Wang received the prestigious NSF CAREER Award ($512,108) to explore intriguing wave-like phonon transport phenomena in metamaterials. The work will potentially advance the thermal management of nanoelectronics and the development of thermoelectrics. Many thanks to the NSF for this award. Read the news here.
-
NSF CDS&E Award
Date: 03/18/2020
We, in collaboration with Dr. Lei Cao's group, obtained a $350,000 Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for our project, CDS&E: Nanoconfined Heating via Ultrahigh-repetition-rate Lasers for Enhanced Surface Processing. In this project, we strive to develop and apply advanced theoretical and computational methods to explore the intriguing thermal transport and material evolutions in materials undergoing ultra-high-repetition rate laser processing. The project will officially start on July 1st, 2020. Many thanks to the NSF!
-
Two Best Poster Awards in IMECE 2019!
Date: 11/13/2019
Our group won two Best Poster Awards in the International Mechanical Engineering Congress & Exposition (IMECE) 2019. Pranay's poster was on Machine Learning-Based Design of Multilayered Structures to Quench Coherent Phonon Transport and Tengfei's poster was on Dimensionality Effect on Anderson Localization of Phonons. Congratulations on such great achievements!
-
-
ACS PRF Doctoral New Investigator Award
Date: 09/01/2019
Dr. Wang received the Doctoral New Investigator award ($110,000) from the American Chemical Society’s Petroleum Research Fund to support our lab's research on thermal transport in clathrate hydrates. Many thanks to the ACS PRF for this generous support!
News
Lack of maintenance. Will update soon. Some particularly good news from July 2020 to August 2021: Pranay passed his Ph.D. dissertation defense on Feb 3, 2021, so he is officially Dr. Chakraborty now; Dr. Wang gave an invited talk at the 21st Symposium on Thermophysical Properties; Dr. Iyyappa Rajan joined us as a postdoc researcher; Milad Nasiri and Haoran Cui joined us as Ph.D. students; Dr. Wang received multiple awards/grants, including NSF CAREER, NSF EPSCoR RII Track-4, NRC grant, and differential fee funding from UNR, so we are badly in need of motivated talents to join our group.
2021-12-07 Invited Talk Dr. Wang gave an invited talk at the MRS 2021 Fall meeting. He discussed the complex roles of interfaces in affecting thermal transport in materials.
2020-07-06 Best Poster Award Congratulations to Pranay for winning a Best Poster Award in the NV NASA Programs 2020 Virtual Poster Competition!
2020-05-18 Paper accepted Our paper, The Dimensionality Effect on Phonon Localization in Graphene/Hexagonal Boron Nitride Superlattices, in collaboration with Dr. Lin, is accepted by 2D Materials, a journal of the Institute of Physics (IOPscience). Tengfei is the first author. Congratulations!
2020-04-24 Research Enhancement Grant Thanks to the Office of Research & Innovation for the Research Enhancement Grant
2020-03-18 NSF Award Thanks to the NSF for the $350K grant supporting our project, "CDS&E: Nanoconfined Heating via Ultrahigh-repetition-rate Lasers for Enhanced Surface Processing," in collaboration with Dr. Lei Cao in our department.
2020-03-10 Best Poster Award Pranay won the best poster award in the Mechanical Engineering Graduate-Undergraduate Student Poster Contest at UNR. Congratulations!
2020-02-25 Conference talk Pranay gave a talk on "Physics-guided Machine-Learning Design of Aperiodic Superlattices with Maximum Localization of Coherent Phonons" at the TMS conference held in San Diego, CA. It is an overview of our recently published paper at ACS Applied Materials&Interfaces. This is our debut at the TMS conference.
2020-01-29 Paper published Our paper, Quenching Thermal Transport in Aperiodic Superlattices: a Molecular Dynamics and Machine Learning Study was accepted by ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces. The draft has been published online. Congratulations to Pranay, Tengfei, and Xixi for this achievement.
2020-01-23 Paper published The paper, Scalable and controlled creation of nanoholes in graphene by microwave-assisted chemical etching for improved electrochemical properties, led by Prof. Nian's group from ASU and resulted from our collaborative NSF project has been published online at Carbon.
2019-12-31 Paper published Our review paper First-principles Modeling of Thermal Transport in Materials: Achievements, Opportunities, and Challenges is published online (on the last day of 2019) at the International Journal of Thermophysics. Congratulations to Tengfei, Pranay, and Xixi for this achievement. Many thanks to the editorial office for the invitation to write and submit this paper.
2019-12-16 Conference activities Dr. Wang gave a panel talk and a regular research presentation at the 2nd Pacific Rim Thermal Engineering Conference (PRTEC) in Maui, Hawaii. He also chaired a session on Molecular Simulations.
2019-12-14 Invited panel talk Dr. Wang gave a panel talk, “Reduced Phonon Transport in Disordered Materials: Scattering or Localization?” at the 2nd Pacific Rim Thermal Engineering Conference (PRTEC) in Maui, Hawaii.
2019-11-15 Student award Congratulations to our undergraduate researchers, Mr. Isaac Chiu, for winning the NSF EPSCoR UROP (Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program) Scholarship! He will work on training machine learning models for better prediction of coherent and incoherent phonon transport in metamaterials.
2019-11-13 Two best poster awards Our group won two Best Poster Awards in ASME's International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (IMECE) conference. One award was given to Pranay for his poster on machine learning-based prediction of thermal conductivity in multilayered structures and the other award was given to Tengfei for his poster on dimensionality effect on phonon localization. Congratulations!
2019-11-13 Conference activities Our group gave two oral presentations and two poster presentations in IMECE 2019. Dr. Wang chaired three sessions in one day. Prior to that, Dr. Wang served as the topic organizer for two topics.
2019-10-24 Best poster award Pranay won a Best Poster Award (2nd place) in the GSA Poster Symposium, University of Nevada, Reno. Congratulations!
2019-10-10 Student award Pranay is awarded the prestigious Dean's Merit Scholarship for his excellent research and academic achievements. Congratulations!
2019-10-02 Paper published The paper Scalable Production of Integrated Graphene Nanoarchitectures for Ultrafast Solar-Thermal Conversion and Vapor Generation is published in Matter, a journal of the Cell Press.
2019-09-24 New group member Mr. Isaac Chiu joined our group as an undergraduate researcher to work on machine learning and molecular dynamics investigation of thermal transport.
2019-09-24 Paper published Our paper Metal-Level Thermally Conductive yet Soft Graphene Thermal Interface Materials resulted from a multi-group collaboration has been published in ACS Nano.
2019-08-21 Paper published The paper Strong strain hardening in ultrafast melt-quenched nanocrystalline Cu: The role of fivefold twins in collaboration with Prof. Lei Cao's group is published in Journal of Applied Physics.
2019-07-29 ACS PRF Doctoral New Investigator Award Dr. Wang received the ACS PRF Doctoral New Investigator Award to support our project on thermal transport in clathrate hydrates. Many thanks to the generous support from the ACS Petroleum Research Fund.
2019-07-23 Book published The book Carbon-Based Nanomaterials for Advanced Thermal and Electrochemical Energy Storage and Conversion is published by Elsevier. Dr. Wang is a co-editor and our group has contributed chapters to this book.
2019-06-19 Paper published The paper Multifunctional Solar Waterways: Plasma‐Enabled Self‐Cleaning Nanoarchitectures for Energy‐Efficient Desalination in collaboration with several other research groups is published in Advanced Energy Materials.
2019-05-08 M.S. thesis defense Congratulations to Connor for successfully defending his M.S. thesis! Connor is the first M.S. student graduating from our lab. He has made significant contributions to the experiments on thermal and thermoelectric materials in our lab. Thank you, Connor! Best wishes to your future endeavors!
2019-04-18 K-12 outreach Our group hosted 8 sessions of research and educational demos as part of the Engineer's Day, which is for middle and high school students from Northern Nevada and California. More details about the involvement of our lab in this event can be found here.
2019-03-12 Paper published The paper Significantly enhanced convective heat transfer through surface modification in nanochannels, in collaboration with Prof. Lei Cao, has been published by International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer.
2019-02-15 New course developed Dr. Wang proposed a new class, ME 714: Advanced Heat Transfer, in which he will discuss the use of advanced mathematical and numerical methods for solving complex heat transfer problems. Dr. Wang will start offering this class in Fall 2019. This is the second brand-new course developed by Dr. Wang since joining UNR. More details about this class can be found here. Students interested in this class or would like to give some suggestions are welcome to contact Dr. Wang for more details.
2019-01-28 Paper published The paper, Reducing Interfacial Thermal Resistance between Metal and Dielectric Materials , in collaboration with Prof. Xiulin Ruan and Prof. Yong Chen from Purdue University has been published by Journal of Applied Physics. We explored the effect of interlayer on thermal transpot across metal-nonmetal interface, which is a nice demonstration of the predictions by our previous theoretical work.
2018-12-07 Poster award Pranay's poster on heat convection in nanochannel received Honorable Mention in today's 2018 Mechanical Engineering Graduate Student Poster Contest.
2018-11-15 Conference activities Pranay, Tengfei, and Dr. Wang have finished their mission at IMECE 2018. Dr. Wang organized a panel on nonequilibrium transport in the heat transfer division. Plus, we made four presentations in the conference.
2018-10-01 Featured article Our review paper "Carbon-Based Materials for Thermoelectrics," has been selected as a Featured Article by Advances in Condensed Matter Physics.
2018-09-01 NASA grant The project "Research Infrastructure Development for Microstructure-Oriented Manufacturing of Thermoelectric Materials for Space Power Applications" in collaboration with Dr. Lei Cao and Dr. Jaeyun Moon is funded by NASA! The role of our group is modeling and measurement of the thermoelectric properties of materials manufactured with desired microstructures.
2018-09-01 NSF award The project "Collaborative Research: Photon-Enabled Atomic Drilling of Graphene for Supercapacitors" in collaboration with Dr. Leon Liao is funded by the National Science Foundation for a period of 3 years (09/2018-08/2021). The role of our group is modeling and simulation of the photon-enabled atomic drilling process for fabricating porous graphene-based supercapacitors.
2018-08-01 New group member and student award Ms. Xixi Guo joined our group as a PhD student after obtaining her master's degree at Huazhong University of Science and Technology. She was awarded the prestigious Graduate Dean’s Fellowship. No more than 2 students from the College of Engineering could receive this award each year. Congratulations!
2018-08-01 New group member Mr. Connor Rock joined our group as a master's student after obtaining his bachelor's degree at UNR. Welcome!
2018-07-04 Paper published Our review paper, "Carbon-Based Materials for Thermoelectrics," which was invited for submission to Advances in Condensed Matter Physics, has been published. Working closely with Prof. Lei Cao's group, we provided a comprehensive review on thermoelectric and mechanical properties of carbon-baesd thermoelectric materials (carbon allotropes and their composites with polymers). Congratulations to Pranay and Tengfei! Happy July 4th!
2018-06-14 Paper published Pranay's 1st-authored paper, "Lattice thermal transport in superhard hexagonal diamond and wurtzite boron nitride: A comparative study with cubic diamond and cubic boron nitride," has been published in Carbon. This work results from the close collaboration between Prof. Lei Cao's group, Prof. Guoping Xiong, and our group. Congratulations to Pranay!
2018-06-08 LANL internships Pranay and Tengfei will be spending the summer at Los Alamos National Laboratory working on collaborative research. Good luck!
2018-06-01 Workshop Dr. Wang came back from the "Tracking and Engaging the Future: US Air Force Research in 2030" workshop, joining university researchers to help define a list of visionary research topics that the United States Air Force should be investigating by 2030.
2018-05-08 Student award Samuel was awarded the Outstanding Senior Award (the only one in ME). He will be a boilermaker attending graduate school at Purdue University, West Lafayette.
2018-04-19 Seminar Dr. Wang gave a seminar on "Nanoengineering of Materials for Improved Energy Efficiency and Thermal Management" at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
2018-02-16 Paper published Dr. Wang's co-authored paper entitled "The critical particle size for enhancing thermal conductivity in metal nanoparticle-polymer composites" was published by Journal of Applied Physics.
2017-12-22 New group member Ms. Mirica Krajewski joined our group as an undergraduate researcher. Welcome!
2017-11-09 Conference activities Dr. Wang and Pranay have finished their mission at IMECE. Dr. Wang chaired/co-chaired two conference sessions in the heat transfer division. Pranay gave three excellent talks. What a fruitful (and busy) trip! We would like to thank the travel grant from the Office of VPRI and Graduate Student Association at UNR.
2017-11-08 Conference presentations Pranay gave THREE talks in ASME's IMECE 2017 conference at Tampa, Florida today. One of them is based on our recent work published in Scientific Reports, in which we revealed the possibility of achieving ultralow lattice thermal conductivity through hierarchical suppression of coherent and incoherent phonon transport. The other two are about heat convection enhancement, one of which focuses more on heat transfer and the other more on the fluid dynamics side. All three talks were well received by the audience. Excellent job, Pranay!
2017-10-10 New course developed Dr. Wang proposed a new graduate-level class, ME758: Thermal and Structural Analysis of Nanomaterials, which is the first class at UNR providing detailed and hands-on trainings of computational analysis of thermal and structural properties of materials. Dr. Wang will start offering this class in Spring 2018.
2017-09-22 New group member Mr. Peter Chin joined our group as an undergraduate researcher. Welcome!
2017-09-07 Poster presentation Pranay gave a presentation titled "Hierarchical Suppression of Coherent and Incoherent Phonon Transport in Multilayered Structures" in the poster session of the Distinguished Lecture Series held by the University of Nevada, Reno. This is one of the four posters from the Department of Mechanical Engineering.
2017-08-22 New group member Mr. Tengfei Ma joined our group as a PhD student. Prior to joining us, he earned a master's degree in Power Engineering from North China Electric Power University (NCEPU), China in 2017. Welcome, Tengfei!
2017-07-26 Conference abstract accepted Pranay's 3rd abstract entitled "Enhancing convective heat transfer in nanochannels through surface modification " has been accepted by IMECE 2017. It is going to be a fruitful travel. Congratulations, Pranay!
2017-07-21 Conference abstract accepted Pranay's abstract entitled "Surface engineering for enhanced heat convection in nanochannels" has been accepted by IMECE 2017. He will make a presentation on this topic in the IMECE 2017 this November. Congratulations, Pranay!
2017-07-10 Paper accepted Pranay's first-authored paper entitled "Ultralow Lattice Thermal Conductivity of the Random Multilayer Structure with Lattice Imperfections" has been accepted by Scientific Reports. Congratulations, Pranay!
2017-06-06 Teaching evaluation Dr. Wang received an amazingly high teaching evaluation of 3.8/4.0 for his class ME314: Introduction to Heat Transfer of 124 students. Many thanks to the class for your cooperation and hardworking throughout the semester and your kind wishes that I will become a great educator!
2017-06-26 Conference abstract accepted Pranay's abstract entitled "Hierarchical suppression of coherent and incoherent phonon transport in multilayered structures" has been accepted by ASME's International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (IMECE). He will make a presentation on this topic in the IMECE 2017 this November. Congratulations, Pranay!
2017-04-19 Conference presentation Dr. Wang gave a talk "Understanding and Manipulating Coherent and Incoherent Phonon Transport in Multilayered Structures" at MRS 2017 in Phoenix based on Pranay's recent work. We would like to thank the Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation for the faculty travel grant to support this trip.
2017-05-29 New group member Mr. Samuel Frost joined our group as an undergraduate researcher. Welcome!
2017-01-25 New group member Mr. Pranay Chakraborty is the first PhD student in our group. He obtained his master's degree in Mechanical Engineering (focused on thermal science) in Fall 2016.
2016-07-01 Start Dr. Yan Wang has officially started his work as an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering department at the University of Nevada, Reno.