The Art of Measuring in the Thermal Sciences

Josua P. Meyer is a Professor, Head of the Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering, and Chair of the School of Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology. His area of research is convective heat transfer, which relies on the engineering sciences of heat transfer, fluid mechanics, and thermodynamics. He and his students and colleagues have made it possible to predict the heat transfer characteristics in the previously unknown transitional flow regime. He has published more than 800 articles, conference papers, and book chapters in the field of thermal sciences and has successfully supervised more than 100 PhD and MSc students. He established the Clean Energy Research Group at the University of Pretoria, which now has 40 full-time postgraduate students and 13 staff members. The group members have developed, designed, and built more than ten unique, state-of-the-art experimental setups, which are being used for leading-edge heat transfer research. No other similar experimental setup exists in the world. The group conducts joint research and publishes with scholars at EPFL, MIT, Ghent, Duke, and INSA Toulouse.

Michel De Paepe is a Professor of Thermodynamics and Heat Transfer at the Department of Flow, Heat and Combustion Mechanics of the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture of the Ghent University. He is the Program Director of the Master Electromechanical Engineering at the Ghent University. He was supervisor/promotor of 19 PhDs and 150 MScs defended at the Ghent University and is the coauthor of more than 400 articles and conference papers in the field of thermal sciences. In 2002, Professor De Paepe founded the research group Applied Thermodynamics and Heat Transfer. Research by this team, with about 15 PhD students and 3 staff members, focuses on thermodynamics of new energy systems, performance of HVAC systems, and complex heat transfer phenomena in industrial applications, as in compact heat exchangers, combustion engines, refrigerant two-phase flow, and electronics cooling. The team is internationally recognized as an authority in thermal measurement techniques. Several sensors developed by this team are being used by high-level laboratories around the world: the University of Pretoria, INSA Lyon, TU, EPFL, Imperial College London, and the University of Oxford.