POETS benefits from grad student’s work in heat transfer

 

When Patricia Weisensee was a child growing up in Germany, she used to spend the summer days with her grandfather in his wood workshop. 

 

“We would go down to the basement and just build stuff,” she said. 

 

She credits that experience, at least in part, to her future love of engineering. She also credits—not surprisingly—being good at math and physics, a skill beneficial to any engineer.

 

Weisensee is a PhD candidate in mechanical engineering and a member of the POETS Center (Power Optimization of Electro-Thermal Systems). Her research, out of Professor Bill King's Nanoengineering Lab and Assistant Professor Nenad Miljkovic’s Energy Transport Research Lab, is focused on heat transfer in electronic systems—specifically, droplet-based heat transfer. 

 

“Right now, I’m doing a project that looks at the condensation of water droplets and how to effectively remove them so we can increase the heat transfer—so, basically make the cooling more efficient than what it would usually be,” Weisensee said.

 

Because her research calls for collaboration with people on the electrical side of things, her involvement with POETS is useful because of its interdisciplinary nature. 

 

“It’s really interesting to be able to get input from other disciplines—for example, from the electrical engineers—but also from people who do kind of a system view of it. So, people who are able to integrate what I’m doing on the fundamental side into a real project or into a real system.” 

 

At POETS’s semi-annual meetings, Weisensee is also able to talk with students from all four member universities about their respective projects and get ideas for her own research. Because the other schools have expertise in areas different than Illinois, she said, it’s a good opportunity to learn about how they deal with problems or approach their research.

 

While her love of engineering started at a young age, she hadn’t always set out to be a mechanical engineer. When she began her undergraduate studies in Munich in 2007, she was planning to go into aerospace engineering. But after the first two years of her program, she realized those lectures weren’t what had attracted her to engineering. She found she was more interested in heat transfer lectures, and she made the switch.

 

After she graduates this fall, Weisensee will start a tenure-track faculty position at Washington University in St. Louis in January. 

 

“I’m hoping to continue work on heat transfer—droplet-based heat transfer—but also go a bit into renewable energies, maybe energy storage,” she said. “So, expand my research area.” 

 

What Weisensee loves about her work is that she gets to use her brain a lot, which she says is fun. 

 

“But then again, research is so slow. There are so many times when you’re just stuck, which is frustrating, obviously. But then when you finally get through and find the resolution—if finally my experiments get to work and I see some exciting results that no one else has seen before, that’s really rewarding, and that’s what drives me.”

 

In her new position as a professor, Weisensee is looking forward to working with students. It won’t be her first time; last spring, she taught a class in heat transfer and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. She found the teacher-student interactions to be very rewarding.

 

But Weisensee hasn’t gone without challenges in her career path. Her undergraduate program in Munich had a system in which a large number of students were admitted—she was one of 1,200 freshmen just in mechanical engineering. But after two or three years, students were, as Weisensee put it, “weeded out” until there were only 350 students left.

 

“And you don’t have the interactions with the professors that you have here,” she said. “So that was certainly a challenge. You’re really on your own.”

 

Through each struggle, Weisensee has learned a valuable lesson that she feels applies to people of all fields, professions and experiences. 

 

“I think perseverance is one thing that’s super important not only for a PhD, but just in general. It’s not so much (intelligence) or cleverness, it’s really that you just stick with it and fight for what you really want to do,” she said. “That counts for everything in life.”

 

There are several things Weisensee likes about living in Champaign-Urbana. It’s calm, there’s no traffic, it’s very green and the people are nice. She loves that it’s an educated town, which she said is certainly due to the university being a central part of it. She also loves classical music, so Krannert Center for the Performing Arts is the perfect place for her to spend her time off. 

 

“We’ll see how St. Louis is. It’s going to be much, much bigger and I’m not so sure how that’ll be. But except for mountains and maybe food, I really like it here. I mean, plus it’s far from home, but anywhere in the U.S. would be far from home.”