Visiting Chair Professor for Department of Building Services Engineering

Research Activity : a talk was given on E2I in recent staff meeting and open forum with Professor Anson in May 2008.

Walter W. Yuen is a Professor of the Department of Mechanical and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has served 3 years as the Divisional Vice Chair and 4 years as the Divisional Chair of the Academic Senate of the Santa Barbara campus.He also serves currently as the Faculty Director of the Academic Senate's Center for Faculty Outreach. Professor Yuen's research interests are in two-phase flow, radiation heat transfer, numerical computation and electronic cooling. He is active in ASME and AIAA. He is an Associate Fellow of AIAA. His research has been funded by NSF, NRC, DOE and NASA.

In the area of radiation heat transfer, Professor Yuen is the originator of the generalized zonal method (GZM), scattering mean beam length and the multiple absorption coefficient zonal method (MACZM), which are essential for the development of efficient computational scheme for radiation heat transfer. His current research also includes the application of neural network in the computation of radiative heat transfer.

In the area of combustion, Professor Yuen has received funding from NASA to study the fundamentals of metal combustion in relation to oxygen safety and published actively in the area.He is also active in fire research.His is interested in the role of radiation heat transfer in flame spread, flash over and other important fire safety issues.

In the area reactor Safety and the fundamentals of multi-phase flow.He is the principal researcher responsible for the development of the two computer codes, PM-ALPHA and ESPROSE.m which are the most advanced state-of-the-art numerical tools for analysis of Steam Explosion.He was a co-PI on a number of research grants from DOE and NRC and co-author on over 30 archival and conference publications in these areas.

In the area of electronic cooling, Professor Yuen's current interest is in the cooling of high heat flux electronic packages using high conductivity porous materials (e.g. carbon foams) and other phase change materials (PCM). He is also working to apply these materials to improve building energy conservation and performance.