This three-year award will support U.S.-France cooperative research in heat transfer between Massoud Kaviany of the University of Michigan and Michel Quantard of the Ecole Normale Superieure d'Arts et Metiers in Bordeaux, France. The objective of the research is to study the evaporation of liquids in porous media. The investigators will address thermal nonequilibrium among the solid, liquid and gas phases in order to understand and predict the evaporation rate and thermal and hydraulic phenomena. The U.S. investigator's expertise in experiment and analysis is complemented by French expertise in modeling and theory. The results may have practical applications in heat pipes and transpiration cooling.
