Bio: Patrick E. Hopkins is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Virginia, with courtesy appointments in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Department of Physics. Patrick received his Ph.D. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Virginia in 2008 under the mentorship of Professor Pamela Norris. After his Ph.D., Patrick was one of two researchers in the nation to receive a Truman Fellowship from Sandia National Laboratories in 2008, working under the mentorship of Dr. Leslie Phinney. In 2011, Patrick returned to the University of Virginia and joined the faculty. Patrick’s current research interests are in energy transport, charge flow, laser-chemical processes and photonic interactions with condensed matter, soft materials, liquids, vapors and their interfaces. Patrick’s group at the University of Virginia uses various optical thermometry-based experiments to measure the thermal conductivity, thermal boundary conductance, emissivity, thermal accommodation, strain propagation and sound speed, and coupled electron, phonon, and photon mechanisms in a wide array of bulk materials and nanosystems. In 2021, Patrick co-founded Laser Thermal, Inc., a company based in Charlottesville Virginia that is commercializing thermal conductivity measurement systems that provide non-contact, automated metrologies for thermal properties of thin films, coatings and bulk materials.

Abstract: The heat transfer processes in materials play the critical role in the performance and efficacy in a wide range of materials and technologies, from nano-to-macro scales. Be it a wide bandgap semiconductor film used in power and RF devices for radar, or a carbon composite used as a protecting coating in a hypersonic vehicle, the complex chemistries and heterogeneous interfaces lead to additional thermal resistances that make dissipation of these aforementioned extreme heat fluxes challenging. In this talk, I will discuss our recent research directions that focus on the ability to measure heat transfer processes across interfaces by understanding how thermal carriers (electrons, phonons and photons) couple across material boundaries and surfaces. Specifically, I will discuss our recent research efforts in developing experimental metrologies to measure the heat transfer processes of materials and across interfaces when subjected to thermal and environmental fluxes typical in extreme environments, from nanoscales to macroscales and up to temperature as high as 4000 °C. I will focus on the following directions: laser-based measurements of the thermal conductivity of materials, designing interfaces, interfacial structures and nonequilibrium coupling to control heat flow and thermal boundary resistance, and thermal conductivity and spectral emissivity of ultrahigh temperature materials up to 4000 °C.