MechSE’s Asif wins Research Live! competition

Asif Ahmed, a mechanical engineering doctoral student, has won the campus-wide Research Live! Competition, the first MechSE student to win it in 10 years.

Ahmed’s winning presentation, "Cooling the Future by Bending Metal” focused on his research of advanced shape memory materials processing, characterization and zero-GWP solid-state elastocaloric thermal system design. Under the supervision of Founder Professor Nenad Miljkovic and in collaboration with NASA, Ahmed is developing next-generation refrigerant-free cooling technologies for aerospace and clean energy applications.

In his presentation, Ahmed emphasized the urgent need for alternatives to conventional cooling systems. 

“Today, when we turn on an air conditioner in our home or use a refrigerator in the kitchen, we are still relying on a 100-year-old technology that uses high-GWP refrigerants,” he said. “These refrigerants can be harmful to the environment, and cooling technologies already account for a significant share of global electricity use. What if we could replace conventional refrigerants with a special solid metal that absorbs and releases heat under mechanical loading? That could change the future of refrigeration and air conditioning systems."

Ahmed explained that during his first year in the Energy Transport Research Lab (ETRL), he developed a bending-mode actuation approach to study the thermal response of superelastic NiTi (nickel-titanium) shape memory alloys under different strain conditions using infrared thermography and digital image correlation. To better understand the underlying physics, he also investigated the material’s phase transformation and microstructural behavior at the Materials Research Laboratory. This work later helped lay the foundation for the team’s efforts to develop a continuous bending-mode solid-state cooling device.

While uniaxial loading of NiTi has commonly been explored in elastocaloric research, Ahmed’s work shows the promise of bending as an alternative actuation strategy. Compared with tension or compression, bending can require dramatically lower force, while also offering a more compact and practical pathway for integration into real thermal systems. 

“I am deeply thankful to my advisor, Professor Nenad Miljkovic, for his guidance, to our collaborator Dan Levick of Barrow Green, to my colleague Tayfur Rahman, and to all of my lab mates in ETRL who helped me throughout this project,” Ahmed said.

Research Live!, held this year on April 7, is an annual fast-paced event hosted by the Graduate College and is part of Graduate Student Appreciation Week. The competition among graduate students across the university provides a chance to showcase their work in short, three-minute, two-slide presentations.

This year’s winners included:

• Grand Prize: Asif Ahmed (Mechanical Engineering) - "Cooling the Future by Bending Metal"
• Special Recognition: Bayezid Baten (Civil Engineering) - "The Secret to Stronger Concrete was Hiding in Plain Sight"
• Special Recognition: Nick Pierle (Music) - "(Y)our Voice, (Y)our Choice"
• People's Choice: Nate Wahl (Education Policy, Organization, and Leadership) - "Teaching is Not Neutral"

Watch Ahmed's presentation: