Issam Mudawar receives top world citation recognitions

Issam Mudawar has worked in many aspects of heat and mass transfer, from cooling spacecraft to electric vehicle charging cables. His decades of work have recently been recognized in several international metrics as being one of the most highly-cited researchers in the field.


Mudawar, the Betty Ruth and Milton B. Hollander Family Professor of Mechanical Engineering, is the most cited author of the flagship journal in the field, the International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer. This is according to a recent analysis by Exaly, a non-profit project that serves as an open and comprehensive resource for analysis of scholarly literature and scientometric data covering all services by Google Scholar, Web of Science, Publons, Scopus, Crossref, and ResearchGate combined.

He has an h-index of 101, which measures a researcher’s number of publications, and the number of times those papers have been cited by other researchers. For example, if a researcher's h-index is 100, that person has at least 100 papers that have been cited at least 100 times each. Only 7,000 researchers in the world have achieved this milestone, and Mudawar is among just a handful at Purdue who have been recognized with this honor.

Mudawar came to Purdue in 1984. Since then, he and his team have made numerous groundbreaking discoveries in the fields of flow boiling and spray cooling. He investigated how microgravity affects cryogenic liquids, and worked with Ford Motor Company to pioneer a cable-cooling technology that could potentially charge electric cars in just 5 minutes.  He also helped to design the largest phase experiment ever conducted in space, which is now on the International Space Station.

“For more than 60 years, since the beginning of spaceflight, the field has known that boiling and condensation would be ideal for space, but previous attempts to study these concepts in microgravity hadn’t been successful,” said Mudawar. “The papers we have published over the duration of this project are really almost like a textbook for how to use boiling and condensation in space.”

Beyond his h-index, Mudawar is the world’s top cited researcher in the fields of “Flow Boiling,” “Spray Cooling,” “Microchannels,” and “Microgravity Boiling.” Also, according to AD Scientific Index 2023, which analyzes world citation rankings, Mudawar ranks as top cited researcher in Purdue’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, and one of the top four in Purdue’s Colleges of Engineering and Technology.

 

Source: Issam Mudawar, mudawar@purdue.edu

Writer: Jared Pike, jaredpike@purdue.edu, 765-496-0374