Microchannel Evaporators Don't Care About Your Dissertation: Lessons from Two Decades of Two-Phase Flow Research

Abstract 

Refrigerant flow maldistribution in microchannel evaporators remains one of the more challenging problems in heat pump and air conditioning design. Now, it's a problem I've spent both a graduate career and an industry career trying to solve. This talk traces that arc: from fundamental two-phase flow research in graduate school to the day-to-day realities of developing production heat exchangers at a major HVAC manufacturer, and then into leading a Technology team. These efforts have pushed well past microchannel design alone into full system development and fundamental thermodynamics, but I keep coming back to this same problem. This talk is for researchers who want to see where two-phase flow work actually lands once it leaves the lab, and product constraints override the best solution in favor of good enough.

About the Speaker 

Chad Bowers is the Director of Technology at Daikin Applied Americas, where he leads New Technology Introduction (NTI). Chad's focus on two-phase refrigerant flow began at the University of Illinois , where he conducted research under Predrag Hrnjak at the Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Center on refrigerant flow development and distribution in microchannel manifolds. He continued that work at Creative Thermal Solutions before moving into industry, where he served as a Refrigeration Engineer at Trane, working on unitary packaged and split systems. His background spans heat exchanger design, compressor technology across centrifugal, scroll, screw, and positive displacement platforms. At Daikin, Chad now applies that same foundation in two-phase flow physics to full-system product development, working at the intersection of fundamental thermodynamics and the practical constraints of commercial HVAC equipment design.

Host: Professor Craig Bradshaw