PI Names: Timothy S. Fisher (Purdue University, PI) Costas Grigoropoulos (University of California Berkeley, Co-PI) Jennifer Lukes (University of Pennsylvania, Co-PI) Jayathi Murthy (Purdue University, Co-PI) Greg Walker (Vanderbilt University, Co-PI)
PUBLIC ABSTRACT
A new web-based data repository for the heat-transfer community, qHUB (the ?q? stands for heat transfer) will be planned and implemented with this seed grant. This community is already well known for interdisciplinary and international efforts involving close coordination of technical activities through jointly sponsored conferences and workshops with the IEEE, AIChE, AIAA, and partner societies and organizations in Europe, India and China. The proposed activities extend the capabilities of this successful community-driven federation by exploiting proven cyberinfrastructure and expanding it to place new resources in the hands of the community. qHUB will provide transport phenomena simulation tools from atomistic to continuum scales and will be designed after the successful nanoHUB model. It will also include a database for thermal transport properties and a forum to coordinate collaborative experiments including sample exchanges and the sharing of resources for material synthesis and thermal measurements. In addition, qHUB will provide a centralized resource for educational initiatives, including the sharing of pedagogical resources, a community-access wiki resource, and the dissemination of online video/audio course lectures and seminars with a global reach.
This grass-roots effort includes highly experienced members of the community and enthusiastic, accomplished early-career researchers who will would sustain qHUB for decades. Its approach is aggressive in seeking not only to execute a community planning process for a new engineering virtual organization, but also to deploy substantive prototype content that enables assessment and refinement by the community, with specific plans for international engagement in Europe and Asia. For the technical community, qHUB will provide a forum to discuss and solve new and important research problems requiring expertise in heat transfer and other disciplines. The resources envisioned would also lower barriers for entry to using of the most advanced and technically sophisticated computational tools developed by the broader community, including industry and government laboratories. qHUB content would provide information and learning resources for technical nonexperts in other disciplines, including educational resources for the K-12 level. Lastly, qHUB will catalyze new collaborations within the heat transfer community by reinvigorating it with more convenient, efficient, and substantive modes of interaction.
