John Richard Thome
Professor Emeritus
Fields of expertise
Single and two-phase heat transfer in microchannels;
Pool and convective boiling of pure fluids and mixtures;
Condensation of pure fluids and mixtures;
Falling film evaporation and condensation;
Heat transfer augmentation
Mission
The main fields of research at LTCM Heat and Mass Transfer Laboratory are: Single and two-phase heat transfer in microchannels; Pool and convective boiling of pure fluids and mixtures; Condensation of pure fluids and mixtures; Falling film evaporation and condensation; Heat transfer augmentation; Two-phase flows and modelling of flow regime transitions; Laminar flow heat transfer with enhancements; Flow visualization of two-phase phenomena and void fraction measurements with use of laser sheets; Boiling on tube bundle; Effects on lubricants of two-phase heat transfer.Biography
John R. Thome is Professor of Heat and Mass Transfer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland since 1998, where his primary interests of research are two-phase flow and heat transfer, covering both macro-scale and micro-scale heat transfer and enhanced heat transfer. He directs the Laboratory of Heat and Mass Transfer (LTCM) at the EPFL with a research staff of about 18-20 and is also Director of the Doctoral School in Energy. He received his Ph.D. at Oxford University, England in 1978. He is the author of four books: Enhanced Boiling Heat Transfer (1990), Convective Boiling and Condensation, 3rd Edition (1994), Wolverine Engineering Databook III (2004) and Nucleate Boiling on Micro-Structured Surfaces (2008). He received the ASME Heat Transfer Division's Best Paper Award in 1998 for a 3-part paper on two-phase flow and flow boiling heat transfer published in the Journal of Heat Transfer. He has received the J&E Hall Gold Medal from the U.K. Institute of Refrigeration in February, 2008 for his extensive research contributions on refrigeration heat transfer and more recently the 2010 ASME Heat Transfer Memorial Award. He has published widely on the fundamental aspects of microscale and macroscale two-phase flow and heat transfer and on enhanced boiling and condensation heat transfer.Publications
Infoscience publications
Selected publications
| Zurcher, O., D. Favrat, et al. International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 45(2): 291-301., 2002 |
Development of a diabatic two-phase flow pattern map for horizontal flow boiling. |
| Zurcher, O., D. Favrat, et al. International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 45(2): 303-317., 2002 |
Evaporation of refrigerants in a horizontal tube: an improved flow pattern dependent heat transfer model compared to ammonia data. |
Teaching & PhD
Teaching
Mechanical Engineering