Jeremy Cho, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Friday, Jan. 26th at 3:00pm
MEK 3350

ABSTRACT: We often understand the world through fixed thermodynamic states (e.g., the glass is full versus empty, or the temperature is hot vs cold) rather than through dynamic behaviors (e.g., the glass is leaking, or the temperature is changing). Broadly speaking, I try to see how understanding these dynamic, transport-limited behaviors can be leveraged in some way to augment existing technologies or help us develop completely new technologies. In this talk, I will discuss two ongoing projects. The first is water transport through hydrogels, which is a phenomenon that resembles many flows in biological tissues, biomedical devices, and even water harvesting devices. I will describe how poroelastic diffusion controls water movement in polymeric gels from the meshing of polymer strands and how it could be modified for fast-transport applications—including atmospheric water harvesting. The second project is boiling heat transfer where surfactants can be added to augment heat transfer performance. Our recent work breaks conventional wisdom on the role surfactants play on enhancement as I will explain how diffusion-limited transport of surfactants dictates this enhancement. Both of these projects demonstrate how understanding and controlling key transport phenomena can change the way we approach engineering problems.

BIO: Jeremy Cho is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). He received his BSE in mechanical engineering from the University of Michigan. He received his PhD and SM in mechanical engineering from MIT where he focused on phase-change heat transfer and interfacial phenomena. He was also a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University in the Chemical and Biological Engineering Department where he studied water transport and solid mechanics of granular hydrogel systems. In 2022, he received the National Science Foundation CAREER and the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund Doctoral New Investigator awards. As he is originally from Hawaiʻi, Jeremy named his group “Da Kine Lab” from Hawaiian Pidgin as the term is a placeholder similar to “whatchamacallit” representing the very diverse range of research topics he pursues: liquid-vapor phase-change phenomena, heat and mass transfer, interfacial and wetting phenomena, surfactant chemistry, and polymer physics.