Achievement

Robert Crawford’s research focus is around the thermal management of buildings and nutrient feeding of microorganisms. He has completed a four part study developing an evaporation based, passive pumping system and analyzed factors that may limit operations. In the first part, the aforementioned system is designed and constructed with special attention paid to the effect of microchannel feeding dimensions on evaporation rates and pumping height. The second part probes the heat removal capability of the system when subjected to constant, uniform heat fluxes. In the third part, the effect of fouling and degradation of the evaporation surface is explored. The last part focuses around applying the system to a building to determine the feasibility of lessening air conditioning loads.