Grainger VIP Impact Report

GRAINGER PROFESSORSHIP IN SUSTAINABLE ENERGY

In the summer of 2023, I underwent emergency heart surgery. This event significantly altered the trajectory of the past year. Luckily for me, the issue was caught before it caused a major problem; surgery was successful, and I am recuperating well and approaching a recovered state. What was perhaps the most surprising aspect of the whole process was the toll it took on my ability to fully concentrate, which impacted my scholarly contributions writ large. In spite of this, in the fall semester, I taught the course that I recently developed — Energy, Sustainability, and Technology. While, for reasons given above, it did not go as well as I would have liked, I did learn some useful lessons about how to improve the course for this fall semester. First, I am engaging more outside practitioners as guest lecturers. Second, parts of the course are very information dense. I am moving some of that information to prerecorded lectures to free up time in class for discussion and problem solving. There is not a good reference text, which makes doing homework problems, most of which entail computer solutions, difficult for students. Finally, much of the course revolves around the analysis of different technologies from the perspective of establishing realistic performance limits and adverse consequences, and I present the analysis. I intend to engage student groups in this analysis and presentation to the class as a means of deepening their knowledge of specific topics. My research activities are focused on engine heat transfer and diesel ignition processes and are supported mainly by the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense. The work is a balance between experiments and computations, with a growing emphasis on the latter.

Jaal Ghandhi ’86, MS’88 Grainger Professor of Sustainable Energy Department of Mechanical Engineering

36

WISCONSIN FOUNDATION AND ALUMNI ASSOCIATION | 608-263-4545 | SUPPORTUW.ORG