Yuwen Zhang is a Chinese-American professor of mechanical engineering who is well known for his contributions to phase change heat transfer. He is a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, where he served as a Department Chair from 2013 to 2017. He was named a James C. Dowell Professor in 2012, a Curators' Distinguished Professor in 2020 , and a Huber and Helen Croft Chair in Engineering in 2021.
Yuwen Zhang was born in 1964 in Xiaoyi, Shanxi, China and spent his early life there until 1981, when he was entered university. He earned his B.E. degree in turbomachinery engineering, M.E. and D.Eng. degrees in engineering thermophysics from Xi'an Jiaotong University, in 1985, 1988 and 1991, respectively. In 1998, he received a Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Connecticut.
Zhang began his academic career teaching at Xi'an Jiaotong University (1991-1994) before serving as a research associate at Wright State University (1994âÂÂ1995) and the University of Connecticut (1995âÂÂ1996). Following his doctoral studies, he worked as a research scientist at University of Connecticut (1999-2000) and entered the private sector as a senior engineer at Thermoflow, Inc. in 2000. He returned to academia in 2001 as an assistant professor at New Mexico State University. In 2003, he joined the University of Missouri (MU) as an associate professor, rising to the rank of full professor in 2009. He served as the Department Chair of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from 2013 to 2017.
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 500 technical publications, include more than 300 journal papers.
He has developed pioneering 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 has pioneered fundamental models of fluid flow and heat transfer in the oscillating heat pipes, 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. Moreover, he has pioneered application of AI and machine learning for efficient and accurate solution of multiphase heat and mass transfer and inverse heat conduction problems.