Faculty Research
Ronald Warzoha
Professor, Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering Department
Dr. Ron Warzoha is a Professor in the Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering Department and has expertise in the areas of nanoscale and microscale energy transport, with a specific emphasis on thermal transport in applied materials and interfaces. In the past, Prof. Warzoha has studied thermal transport across nanoparticle interfaces, heat flow within thermal energy storage materials and has developed nanostructured thermal interface materials for use in electronics packaging systems. At present, Prof. Warzoha is working on several projects that are funded by two ONR contracts (ONR Thermal Transport Processes, ONR Counter-Directed Energy Weapons), including the examination of phonon scattering due to mass impurities and dislocations at interfaces in optical ceramics, measurements of electron-phonon interactions in non-noble metals, and the thermal characterization of shape memory alloys for use in solid-state elastocaloric refrigeration systems. Prof. Warzoha has also done extensive work in the broad area of thermal measurement science, having developed both a miniaturized steady-state heat meter bar apparatus for the measurement of thermal resistance across relevant, micron-scale electronics packaging interfaces as well as an optical pump-probe technique called Frequency-Domain Thermoreflectance (FDTR) to measure thermal transport properties in nanostructured thin films and associated interfaces. Prof. Warzoha was honored with a “Best Paper” award at the 2016 IEEE Intersociety Thermal and Thermomechanical Phenomena in Electronic Systems Conference, and has (in-press) 8 peer-reviewed journal articles as a Professor at the Naval Academy. Prof. Warzoha collaborates with several members of the Phsyics, Chemistry and Mechanical Engineering Departments, as well as research scientists and faculty at NRL, ARL, NREL, Purdue, Penn, Villanova and UC Irvine, and has mentored several undergraduate research students, Bowman Scholars and Trident Scholars.
