Graduate Student Work
Subhead: Why I've been ignoring you for the last two months ...
I haven't been trying to be rude, though I'm sure that 99% of you believe that some evil changeling has abducted my mind. It's just that these last couple of months have been spent finishing up my research and completing my thesis (yesterday, 21 August 1998, I got all of the signatures). So here is my abstract:
Micron-Scale Thermistors for Rapid Transients in Interfacial Temperatures
by Michael Liu; copyright 1998 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all rights reserved (they made me put it on ...)
The shape of freezing droplets is controlled by the motion of the molten interface, or contact line, between the liquid droplet and the solid target. The solution for the heat transfer between the liquid and solid has an analytical singularity at the contact line. We therefore wish to closely examine the temperature history of the contact line as it spreads across a target. In order to achieve high spatial and temporal resolution in our temperature sensors, we use microsensors (specifically, thin-film thermistors), which are built using standard integrated-circuit techniques. A complete data acquisition system was built around the sensors, including various signal-conditioning hardware and software. The integrated-circuit processes to build our microsensors limit our choices of target materials. Previous analyses of droplet spreading in our group have focussed on the spreading of molten materials on targets of the same kind or of similar thermal characteristics. In contrast, the microsensor targets will have thermal conductivities and diffusivities at least an order of magnitude greater than that of the molten materials in use. Thus, we also characterized the spreading of a molten droplet on a substrate of a different type. Finally, we characterized the sensorsí resistance response to temperature changes, during both spreading and calibration experiments.
Thesis Supervisor: Prof. Ain A. Sonin
Thesis Supervisor: Prof. Taiqing Qiu
The full, 103-page text will be available through the MIT Library System. Personally, I find the acknowledgements much more edifying, although probably more of interest to the people of the FML (Fluid Mechanics Lab) from the past couple of years.
Take me back to Mike's home page