ABSTRACT

This talk will present some of our work in developing innovative solutions at the energy and water nexus, including thermoelectric and thermogalvanic materials and systems for direct conversion of heat into electricity, high thermal conductivity semiconductors and polymers, optically opaque and infrared transparent fabrics, and clean water technologies. Thermoelectric devices can convert heat into electricity directly without moving parts. Despite that thermoelectric materials have seen significant improvements over last two decades, innovations are needed to develop their applications since their heat-to-electricity conversion efficiencies are still limited. Electrochemical systems such as batteries can also be used to convert heat into electricity, which could be especially attractive for low temperature waste heat recovery. Opposite to thermoelectric energy conversion calling for low thermal conductivity materials, many other applications require high thermal conductivity materials. We have been developing materials with high thermal conductivity ranging from semiconductors to polymers, such as BAs which has second highest thermal conductivity behind diamond. Although polymers are usually thermal insulators, we show that they can be made as thermally conductive as metals by aligning molecular orientations. After these examples, we turn attention to energy and water technologies based on engineering thermal radiation. With properly chosen polymer fiber diameters, we design fabrics so that they are opaque to visible light and yet allow thermal radiation from human body to escape to environment for passively cooling of human body.  We also demonstrate the ability of boiling water and even creating super-heated steam under unconcentrated sunlight. The talk will be accompanied by reflections of motivations at both fundamental and applied level.  

BIOGRAPHY

Gang Chen is currently Carl Richard Soderberg Professor of Power Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). From 2013 to 2018, he served as the Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. He also directed the "Solid-State Solar-Thermal Energy Conversion Center (S³TEC Center)" - an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the US Department of Energy from 2009 to 2019. He obtained his PhD degree from the Mechanical Engineering Department, UC Berkeley. He was a faculty member at Duke University and UCLA, before joining MIT in 2001. He received an NSF Young Investigator Award, an R&D 100 award, an ASME Heat Transfer Memorial Award and the Frank Kreith Memorial Award, a Nukiyama Memorial Award by the Japan Heat Transfer Society, a World Technology Network Award in Energy, an Eringen Medal from the Society of Engineering Science, and the Capers and Marion McDonald Award for Excellences in Mentoring and Advising from MIT.  He is a fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Association for Advancement of Science, APS, ASME, Guggenheim Foundation; an academician of Academia Sinica; and a member of the US National Academy of Engineering.

Natural and man-made disruptive events can have major impact on our transportation system.  These events range from simple traffic accidents to major loss of infrastructure as a result of natural disasters, such as hurricanes and earthquakes.  The major goal of transportation agencies is to make sure that the affected transportation system continues to operate at an acceptable level of service under the threat of such events.  This can be achieved by developing and deploying effective on and off line incident and emergency management plans.  In this presentation, we will use real-world examples to illustrate major issues related to incident / emergency operations and their planning and real-time management.  Then, modeling needs will be discussed with the goal of focusing on emerging issues such as data driven dynamic forecasting models and real-time control, use of on-line traffic data, role of feedback mechanisms, effect of uncertainties and cascading failures, and real-world implementation.  Application examples will be from the Greater NY/NJ metropolitan area where Hurricanes Irene and Sandy increased the awareness of the need for such comprehensive decision support systems.

Human decision-making during evacuation and loss of network capacity will be presented as major sources of uncertainty that need to be incorporated into dynamic traffic models.  Mathematical models developed to capture these uncertainties and their introduction into the network assignment will also be discussed. The computational and theoretical challenges of using this new type of probabilistic modeling approach for real-time decision-making will be presented. 

The talk will be concluded with the discussion of some of the most promising future directions and opportunities for effective planning and management of real-time incident and emergency operations as a result of the emergence of disruptive technologies such as big data, AI and machine learning, and connected / autonomous vehicles among others.

 Biographical Sketch

K. Ozbay joined Civil and Urban Engineering at NYU Tandon School of Engineering and Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) as a tenured full Professor at NYU on August 2013.  He is currently the Director of the C2SMART Center (Tier 1 UTC funded by USDOT).  Prior to that Professor Ozbay was a tenured full Professor at Rutgers University’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering where he joined as an Assistant Professor in July 1996. In 2008, he was a visiting scholar at the Operations Research and Financial Engineering (ORFE) Department at, Princeton University.

Professor Ozbay has more than 30 years of expertise in transportation and traffic engineering.  His research interests in transportation cover a wide range of topics including the development of simulation models of large networks with connected and autonomous vehicles, advanced technology and sensing applications for Intelligent Transportation Systems, modeling and evaluation of traffic incident and emergency management systems, feedback based on-line real-time traffic control techniques, traffic safety, application of operations research techniques in network optimization and humanitarian inventory control, and transportation economics.

Dr. Ozbay is the recipient of the prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award. His research interests in transportation cover a wide range of topics including data analytics for advanced technology and sensing applications in smart cities, development of simulation models of large scale complex transportation systems, modeling and evaluation of traffic incident and emergency management, feedback based on-line real-time traffic control techniques, traffic safety, application of operations research techniques in network optimization and humanitarian inventory control, and transportation economics. He has co-authored 4 books and published approximately 400 refereed papers in scholarly journals and conference proceedings. Prof. Ozbay is also an Associate Editor of the ITS journal. Dr. Ozbay is the co-editor of a book titled “Dynamic Traffic Control & Guidance” published by Springer Verlag’s "Complex Social, Economic and Engineered Networks" series in 2013. He also serves as the Associate Editor of Networks and Spatial Economic journal and Transportmetrica B: Transportation Dynamics journal.

Since 1994, Dr. Ozbay, has been the Principal Investigator and Co-Principal Investigator of 100 projects funded at a level of more than $25,00,000 by National Science Foundation, NJDOT, NYMTC, NY State DOT, New Jersey Highway Authority, USDOT, FHWA, VDOT, CUNY University Transportation Research Center (UTRC), Department of Homeland Security, USDOT ITS Research Center of Excellence.