Lakshmi Sirisha Maganti

Superior dielectric breakdown strength of graphene and carbon nanotube infused nano-oils

Nano-oils comprising stable and dilute dispersions of synthesized Graphene (Gr) nanoflakes and carbon nanotubes (CNT) have been experimentally observed for the first time to exhibit augmented dielectric breakdown strengths compared to the base transformer oils. Variant nano-oils comprising different Gr and CNT samples suspended in two different grades of transformer oils have yielded consistent and high degrees of enhancement in the breakdown strength. The apparent counter-intuitive phenomenon of enhancing insulating caliber of fluids utilizing nanostructures of high electronic conductance has been shown to be physically consistent thorough theoretical analysis. The crux mechanism has been pin pointed as efficient charge scavenging leading to hampered streamer growth and development, thereby delaying probability of complete ionization. The mathematical analysis presented provides a comprehensive picture of the mechanisms and physics of the electrohydrodynamics involved in the phenomena of enhanced breakdown strengths. Furthermore, the analysis is able to physically explain the various breakdown characteristics observed as functions of system parameters, viz. nanostructure type, size distribution, relative permittivity, base fluid dielectric properties, nanomaterial concentration and nano-oil temperature. The mathematical analyses have been extended to propose a physically and dimensionally consistent analytical model to predict the enhanced breakdown strengths of such nano-oils from involved constituent material properties and characteristics. The model has been observed to accurately predict the augmented insulating property, thereby rendering it as an extremely useful tool for efficient design and prediction of breakdown characteristics of nanostructure infused insulating fluids. The present study, involving experimental investigations backed by theoretical analyses and models for an important dielectric phenomenon such as electrical breakdown can find utility in design of safer and more efficient high operating voltage electrical drives, transformers and machines.

Selecting optimal parallel microchannel configuration(s) for active hot spot mitigation of multicore microprocessors in real time

Design of effective micro cooling systems to address the challenges of ever increasing heat flux from microdevices requires deep examination of real time problems and has been tackled in depth. The most common and apparently misleading assumption while designing micro cooling systems is that the heat flux generated by the device is uniform, but the reality is far from this. Detailed simulations have been performed by considering non uniform heat load employing the configurations U, I, Z for parallel microchannel systems with water and nanofluids as the coolants. An Intel Core i7 4770 3.40 GHz quad core processor has been mimicked using heat load data retrieved from a real microprocessor with non-uniform core activity. The study clearly demonstrates that there is a non-uniform thermal load induced temperature maldistribution along with the already existent flow maldistribution induced temperature maldistribution. The suitable configuration(s) for maximum possible overall heat removal for a hot zone while maximizing the uniformity of cooling have been tabulated. An Eulerian Lagrangian model of the nanofluids show that such smart coolants not only reduce the hot spot core temperature, but also the hot spot core region and thermal slip mechanisms of Brownian diffusion and thermophoresis are at the crux of this. The present work conclusively shows that high flow maldistribution leads to high thermal maldistribution, as the common prevalent notion, is no longer valid and existing maldistribution can be effectively utilized to tackle specific hot spot location, making the present study important to the field.

Smart viscoelastic and self-healing characteristics of graphene nano-gels

Readily synthesizable nano-graphene and poly ethylene glycol based stable gels have been synthesized employing an easy refluxing method, and exhaustive rheological and viscoelastic characterizations have been performed to understand the nature of such complex gel systems. The gels exhibit shear thinning response with pronounced yield stress values which is indicative of a microstructure, where the graphene nanoflakes intercalate (possible due to the refluxing) with the polymer chains and form a pseudo spring damper network. Experimentations on the thixotropic behavior of the gels indicate that the presence of the G nanoflakes leads to immensely augmented structural stability capable of withstanding severe impact shears. Further information about the localized interactions of the G nanoflakes with the polymer chains is revealed from the amplitude and frequency sweep analyses in both linear and non-linear viscoelastic regimes. Massively enhanced cross over amplitude values are recorded and several smart eff...

Enhanced breakdown performance of Anatase and Rutile titania based nano-oils

Nano-oils synthesized by dispersing dielectric nanostructures counter common intuition as such nano-oils possess substantially higher positive dielectric breakdown voltage with reduced streamer velocities than the base oils. Nano-oils comprising stable and dilute homogeneous dispersions of two forms of titanium (IV) oxide (TiO2) nanoparticles (Anatase and Rutile) have been experimentally examined and observed to exhibit highly enhanced dielectric breakdown strength compared to the conventional transformer oils. The present study involves titania dispersed in two different grades of transformer oils, both with varied levels of thermal treatment, to obtain consistent and high degrees of enhancement in the breakdown strength, as well as high degrees of increment in the survival of the oils at elevated electrical stressing compared to the base oils, as obtained via detailed twin parameter Weibull distribution analysis of the experimental observations. The experimental results demonstrate higher augmented breakdown strength for Anatase compared to the Rutile phase of titania. In-depth survey of literature indicates that mostly Rutile based oils are used. However, the present study shows that they exhibit relatively less breakdown strength enhancement compared to the Anatase based oils. It is also observed that heat treatment of the nano-oils further enhances the dielectric breakdown performance. The differences in the performance of Anatase and Rutile has been explained based on the electronic structure of the two and the affinity towards electron scavenging and the theory has been found to validate the experimental observations.

Predicting thermal history a-priori for magnetic nanoparticle hyperthermia of internal carcinoma

This article proposes a simplistic and realistic method where a direct analytical expression can be derived for the temperature field within a tumour during magnetic nanoparticle hyperthermia. The approximated analytical expression for thermal history within the tumour is derived based on the lumped capacitance approach and considers all therapy protocols and parameters. The present method is simplistic and provides an easy framework for estimating hyperthermia protocol parameters promptly. The model has been validated with respect to several experimental reports on animal models such as mice/rabbit/hamster and human clinical trials. It has been observed that the model is able to accurately estimate the thermal history within the carcinoma during the hyperthermia therapy. The present approach may find implications in a-priori estimation of the thermal history in internal tumours for optimizing magnetic hyperthermia treatment protocols with respect to the ablation time, tumour size, magnetic drug concentra...