Tomoki Hirokawa
Assistant Professor | Ph.D. in Engineering
Mechanical Engineering Course
Field of Mechanical Engineering
Tomoki Hirokawa's teaching draws on concrete, real-world examples to show how course material is applied in society, helping students understand not only what they are learning but why it matters. His research addresses energy conservation from the perspective of thermal engineering, with the aim of contributing to society more broadly.
Elucidating the Thermal-Fluid Characteristics of Heat Exchangers
What students can learn
Students gain grounding in heat transfer engineering, heat exchanger design, methods for evaluating heat transfer performance, fluid experimental techniques, refrigeration cycle calculations, and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation.
With the aim of contributing to energy conservation, this research investigates the detailed local thermal-fluid behavior of heat exchangers that has not yet been fully clarified. Focusing on plate heat exchangers, which are widely used in automotive thermal management and in heating and hot-water systems, the work employs an original design approach to reveal internal heat-flow patterns and to build a database that supports performance improvement. At present, only about 40 percent of the thermal energy we consume is put to effective use. This research seeks to develop high-performance heat exchangers for recovering and utilizing the remaining 60 percent of that energy, with the eventual goal of implementing these advances in society.
Next-Generation Cooling Systems for Ultra-High-Heat-Flux Electronic Devices
What students can learn
Students build skills in the design of cooling devices, methods for evaluating heat transfer performance, thermal-fluid experimentation, and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation.
Improving the efficiency of semiconductor chips used in supercomputers and data centers, as well as inverters used in electric vehicles and renewable-energy power plants, requires overcoming the bottleneck posed by heat generation. This research focuses on boiling-based cooling methods, which offer the potential for dramatically greater cooling performance than conventional air- and liquid-cooling approaches, and investigates their underlying thermal-fluid characteristics. Implementing such a cooling system would improve the efficiency of electronic devices—whose power consumption is projected to increase 36-fold by 2030 relative to 2016—thereby contributing to energy conservation.
