Yuwen Zhang

Yuwen Zhang is an American professor of mechanical engineering who is well known for his contributions to phase change heat transfer. He is presently a Curators' Distinguished Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri.
Education and career.
Yuwen Zhang earned his B.E. degree in thermal turbomachinery, M.E. and D.Eng. degrees in engineering thermophysics from Xi'an Jiaotong University, in 1985, 1988 and 1991, respectively. He taught at Xi'an Jiaotong University from 1991 to 1994 and was a research associate at Wright State University (1994-1995) and University of Connecticut (1995-1996). He received a Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Connecticut in 1998. He was a research scientist at University of Connecticut and a senior engineer at Thermoflow, Inc. before joining the Department of Mechanical Engineering at New Mexico State University as an assistant professor in 2001. He joined the faculty at the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Missouri (MU) in 2003 as an associate professor and became a full professor in 2009. He was awarded a James C. Dowell Professorship in 2012 and served as the Department Chair from 2013 to 2017. He was named a Curators' Distinguished Professor of the University of Missouri in 2020.
Technical contributions.
Yuwen Zhang's research area is in the field of heat and mass transfer with applications in nanomanufacturing, thermal management, and energy storage and conversion. He has published over 300 journal papers and more than 180 conference publications at national and international conferences. He has developed pioneer models for a latent heat thermal energy storage system, as well as multiscale, multiphysics models on additive manufacturing (AM), including selective laser sintering (SLS) and laser chemical vapor deposition/infiltration (LCVD/LCVI). He is the first to develop fundamental models of fluid flow and heat transfer in the oscillating heat pipes, which is a heat transfer device that can be used in thermal management of electronic devices and energy systems. He carried out theoretical studies on femtosecond laser interaction with metal and biological materials from molecular scales to system levels, and solved inverse heat transfer problems for the determination of the heating condition and/or temperature-dependent macro and micro thermophysical properties under uncertainty. He also investigated the mechanism of heat transfer enhancement in nanofluids, which are stable colloidal suspensions of solid nanomaterials with sizes typically on the order of 1-100 nm in the base fluid, via molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. Thermal management and temperature uniformity improvement of Li-ion batteries using external and internal cooling methods were also systematically studied by utilizing pin fin heat-sinks and metal/non-metal foams, as well as using electrolyte flow inside the embedded microchannels in the porous electrodes as a novel internal cooling technique.
Professional services.
Yuwen Zhang is the Co-Editor-in-Chief for Frontiers in Heat and Mass Transfer (FHMT), Associate Editor for ASME Journal of Heat Transfer, as well as an editorial board member for eight other journals. As a Fellow of ASME, he was the Chair (2012-2014) and the Vice-Chair (2009-2012) of the K-15 Committee on Transport Phenomena in Manufacturing and Materials Processing of the ASME Heat Transfer Division. As an Associate Fellow of AIAA, he was a Member of the AIAA Thermophysics Technical Committee (2008–2011). He is also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and a member of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE). In these capacities, he has served as track chair and session chairs for numerous national and international conferences.