Exploiting complex heat transfer phenomena: Supercritical working fluids and machines that learn boiling
Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina
Abstract
This talk will present two key research directions pursued by Dr. da Silva’s group at the Laboratory of Energy Conversion Engineering and Energy Technology (LEPTEN), part of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (Brazil). The first part will focus on supercritical fluids and their role in energy systems. The talk will examine how the Widom line—a thermodynamic region where the thermo-physical properties of common supercritical heat-transfer fluids vary sharply—relates to the optimal operating conditions of thermal systems. The second part will highlight the group’s work on machine learning and computer vision applied to phase-change processes. It will be shown that even simple, non-optimized neural networks can classify instantaneous boiling regimes, detect the onset of the boiling crisis, and estimate heat flux directly from visual data, using only low-speed, low-resolution frames.
About the speaker
Dr. Alexandre da Silva is currently a tenured faculty at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), Brazil. He holds a B.S. (’98) and an M.Sc. (’01), both in Mechanical Engineering from UFSC, and a Ph.D. (’05) in Mechanical Engineering from Duke University (USA). His research interests are in the vast area of theoretical and experimental transport phenomena, including renewable energy systems. His research has been funded by several agencies in the USA (e.g., NSF-CAREER, ARPA-E, ARP-THECB) and Brazil (e.g., CNPq, Petrobras, FINEP, AEB). He is a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), a full member of the Pan American Academy of Engineering, a Scientific Council Member of the International Centre for Heat and Mass Transfer (ICHMT) and the leading scientist of the Baseline Surface Radiation Network (BSRN) station FLO-3. Dr. da Silva has published over 110 peer-reviewed journal articles and served as a reviewer for over 50 peer-reviewed periodicals, advised/co-advised more than 40 graduate students and has received the ABCM-Embraer award twice from the Brazilian Association of Engineering and Mechanical Sciences for having advised the best B.S. and M.S. theses in mechanical engineering in Brazil in ’15 and ’18, respectively, and shared the Inventor Award from Petrobras (’23). He is also the Associate Editor for Solar Compass and the Editor of AI Thermal Fluids, both from Elsevier. On a personal note, Dr. da Silva is passionate about endurance sports (triathlon). Over the past five years, he completed multiple races, including a full distance Ironman.
