Lu Lab

Research focus

ERC Starting Grant · 2025

Demystifying interface accommodation coefficients in liquid-vapor phase change devices: role of surface charge, contaminant, and confinement

Liquid-vapor phase change is essential in power generation, heating and cooling, thermal desalination, and membrane distillation. With the advancements enabled by micro/nanoengineering of phase change devices, the interfacial transport resistance becomes increasingly important, dictating the ultimate performance limit. However, fundamental understanding of the interfacial process remains elusive, particularly regarding the interface accommodation coefficients (IACs), which quantify the probability of evaporation and condensation events at the molecular level. Characterizing IACs has been a long-standing challenge, primarily due to the lack of experimental designs sensitive enough to…

From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.