Congratulations to Yajing Zhao for successfully defending her PhD on Scalable Micro/Nanostructured Surfaces for Capillary-Driven Thin-Film Condensation! 

In her thesis, Yajing designed, fabricated, tested, and demonstrated thin-film condensation heat transfer enhancement using commercially available materials and scalable approaches. She proposed to combine electrospun membranes with porous metal substrates as thin-film condenser surfaces. Such surfaces, when designed and manufactured at scale, are expected to outperform the industrial-prevalent filmwise condensation by over 5x in heat transfer, which has the potential to unlock over 300 TWh energy production across the steam power plants globally. Yajing has joined the Activate fellowship 2022 cohort to seek commercialization of surface structures/coatings for enhancing energy efficiency of various industrial processes.