Kenneth Goodson, the Bosch Mechanical Engineering Department Chairman and Davies Family Provostial Professor, has been awarded ASME’s 2014 Heat Transfer Memorial Award in the science category.
The award is given for “seminal contributions to the science and technology of phonon and electron transport and scattering in films and nanostructures through publications, lectures, short courses and mentoring the next generation of university thermal science faculty.”
Goodson is a heat transfer specialist with interests ranging from electronics cooling to vehicle waste heat recovery. His lab pioneered phonon free path measurements using silicon nanolayers and has highly-cited papers on diamond, carbon nanotubes, phase change memory and two-phase microfluidics. Fifteen of Goodson’s PhD graduates are now engineering faculty at MIT, UC Berkeley and other top schools.
Heat transfer is the movement of energy caused by differences in temperature, for example, through the insulation in a house. Recently, Goodson and his students have been developing surprising nanomaterials that conduct heat like metals but are as compliant as Styrofoam. Goodson also mentors a team working on microfluidic heat sinks, and their efforts are extending the extreme limits of convective heat removal from high-power electronics (>100kW/cm2!) for radar and hybrid vehicles.
Founded in 1880 as the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, ASME is a nonprofit professional organization that enables collaboration, knowledge sharing and skill development across all engineering disciplines, while promoting the role of the engineer in society.
