About

Our ML4HEAT aims to enable a new fundamental understanding of phase change mechanisms by investigating long-standing scientific questions. The research will develop an intelligent framework for liquid-vapor phase change physics that integrates advanced metrology with state-of-the-art computer vision (CV) and machine learning (ML) models. The key innovations of the proposed framework are to effectively assemble, interpret, and translate the multimodal, multidimensional, and transient datasets to fully describe the multiphysics nature of phase change heat transfer mechanisms which govern two-phase flows. By learning physics-based priors, the framework will be generalizable, scalable, and explainable, enabling the interpretation of phase change mechanisms for a variety of fluids, flow conditions, and geometries. The advances in phenomenological investigations of complex two-phase flows will advance our understanding about two-phase heat transfer physics and develop new theoretical two-phase frameworks. The research will result in new capabilities for understanding, designing, and operating efficient thermal management systems for Navy power and energy applications. The team consists of researchers from the University of California, Irvine (UCI), Stanford University (Stanford), the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Our interdisciplinary team has expertise in two-phase flow physics, metrology and experiments, design innovations, CV, and ML for thermofluidic science, and scalable ML models.

Group

Investigators

Group Members

Alumni

• Matthew Hughes (Postdoc 2025) - Assistant Professor, University of Michigan
• Youngjoon Suh (PhD 2023, Postdoc 2025) - Assistant Professor, University of Illinois Chicago

Collaborators

• Navy Nuclear Laboratory (NNL)
• Army Research Lab (ARL)
• Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (CERL)
• United States Naval Academy (USNA)
• Argonne National Laboratory (ANL)
• NVIDIA
• Raytheon
• Northrop Grumman

Research

Potential Impact on DoD Applications

Two-phase heat transfer is critical for a variety of Navy and DoD systems, and there is a need to design next-generation thermal systems that are efficient, compact, and resilient. The Navy extensively uses two-phase systems for energy conversion (evaporators and condensers in air conditioning and refrigeration), power generation (nuclear reactors), and thermal management. The Navy anticipates increasing electrification of systems across Navy ships and air vehicles that will extensively use power electronics and electrical storage. Specific examples of high-power devices requiring thermal management include phased-array radar, electronic warfare systems, directed energy weapons, and the electromagnetic railgun. The work proposed here will have a direct impact on both large-scale DoD thermal systems, as well as smaller scale distributed DoD compact thermal management approaches. The better understanding about nucleation heat transfer performances as well as the design of effective two-phase flows will allow for highly compact condensers and evaporators that can be deployed in naval applications.