Research interests: laser-based nanoparticle metrology; gas phase nanoparticle synthesis; gas dynamics and molecular dynamics
Biography
Professor Kyle Daun was born in Winnipeg, Canada, in 1975. He graduated with a B. Sc. (Mech. Eng.) from the University of Manitoba in 1997 and received his Masters in Applied Science (Mech. Eng.) from the University of Waterloo in 1999. For his master’s research under Professor Terry Hollands he developed a methodology for solving radiant enclosure problems through infinitesimal area analysis, based on parametric representation of the enclosure surface.
He then moved to the University of Texas at Austin to research inverse design of infrared heating furnaces under Professors. Jack Howell and David Morton, where he received his Ph. D. in 2003. From 2004 to 2007 he was an NSERC postdoctoral fellow and then a research officer at the Institute for Chemical Process and Environmental Technology at the National Research Council Canada (NRC-ICPET) in Ottawa, where he investigated radiation heat transfer in solid oxide fuel cells with Professor Steven Beale, and then helped develop and improve combustion diagnostics (line-of-sight-attenuation, laser-induced incandescence) with Professors Greg Smallwood and Fengshan Liu. Amongst other accomplishments, he was one of the first to experimentally characterize the gas-surface scattering physics underlying thermal accommodation in LII, which he later validated through molecular dynamics simulations.
In 2007 he returned to the Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering at the University of Waterloo as a professor. His main research interests are heat conduction from aerosolized nanoparticles, laser-based combustion tomography, inverse heat conduction problems in materials processing, and optimal design of industrial combustion devices. He has published over 20 journal papers, and his research is cited in several textbooks on radiative transfer. He is a referee for the Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer (JQSRT), Applied Optics, and the ASME Journal of Heat Transfer.
Education
- PhD, University of Texas at Austin, 2003
- MaSc, Mechanical Engineering, University of Waterloo, 1999
- BSc, Mechanical Engineering, University of Manitoba, 1997
