Quelques enjeux en transferts thermiques

Abstract

Heat transfer is strongly involved in many scientific and technologic domains and the French heat transfer laboratories and networks cooperating is this field are first located. The analysis of the main industrial activities demanding heat transfer competence helps one first to identify some up-to-date technological challenges. It appears clearly that connecions are to be reinforced between disciplines like heat transfer, fluid mechanics, combustion, material science, optics, biology… Scientific objectives are then scanned through, by splitting the research activities between mature topics (radiation, particularly in semi-transparent media; convection and thermoconvective instabilities; heat transfer in porous media…), emerging (heat transfer with change of phase, convective heat transfer enhancement by active control in the boundary layer, inverse techniques…) and incipient ones. Among some promising new topics, let us mention microscale heat transfer, and also bioheat transfer.