Areas of Expertise:

Clean Energy, Energy Economics, Energy Efficiency, Energy Security, Energy Storage, Geothermal, Hydraulic Fracturing, Hydropower, Infrastructure, Innovation, Liquid Fuels, Natural Gas, Nuclear, Oil, Power Sector, R&D, Solar, Water, Wind

Additional Areas of Expertise:

thermo-fluidics (multi-phase flow, boiling-condensation, thermal management), micro/nano-fluidics, micro/nano-technology (DPN, SFIL, CNT synthesis), nanofluids (complex fluids), thermal energy storage/ solar power and numerical simulations (network models, Finite Elements/ FEA, Computational Fluids: CFD/CHT, Molecular Dynamics/ MD).

Dr. Banerjee received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from UCLA (with minor in MEMS). He received 3 M.S. degrees and was invited to 4 national honor societies. He attended the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur for his Bachelor of Technology (Honors). Prior to TAMU, Dr. Banerjee worked as a Manager of Advanced Research & Technology (ART) group at Applied Biosystems Inc. (ABI), CA, (currently merged into Life Technologies). Also as a Hiring Manager at ABI he hired ~ 30 PhDs in ~6 months and managed a group of 10~15 Ph.D. engineers / scientists. Previously in a singular capacity, he developed from concept to a commercial product at NanoInk Inc. (called “InkWells™”, which are microfluidic platforms used for bio/nano-lithography of proteins, nucleic acids, etc.). Dr. Banerjee has 27 intelelctual properties (9 US patents, 8 US provisional patents, 5EP and 5 WO applications), from his work at ABI, Ciphergen Biosystems, NanoInk, Coventor Inc. and TAMU. Since 2005 he has advised 9 PhD and 16 MS students. He received the “Amlan Sen Best Mechanical Engineering Student Award (Endowment)” at the graduation convocation at IIT and the “J.C. Bose National Science Talent Scholarship” from the Govt. of India. He received the “Morris Foster Fellowship (2007-2008)” from Mechanical Engineering Department, the “TEES Select Young Faculty Fellowship (2008-2009)” from the D. Look College of Engineering and was designated as a Faculty Fellow at the Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center at TAMU. He received the “2001 Best Journal Paper Award” from the ASME Heat Transfer Division (HTD), the “New Investigator Award (2005)” from the Texas Space Grants Consortium (TSGC), “3M Non-Tenured Faculty” award (’09-’12), the “ASEE/ AFOSR Summer Faculty Fellowship (’06, ’07)” at AFRL, and the “ASEE/ ONR Summer Faculty Fellowship (’09)” at SPAWAR.

At the Banerjee reserch group (Multiphase Flows and Heat Transfer Lab.) we are developing nanotechnology enabled platforms for enhancing cooling, sensing and energy storage (involving both experimental and computational studies). Coupling of thermal and hydro-dynamic featuresrnduring phase change (boiling, condensation) causes spatio-temporal fluctuations of surface temperature at the micro/nano-scales, which are termed as “cold-spots” and can transmit over 60-90% of the total heat transfer. Using Carbon-Nanotube (CNT) nanocoatings - cooling was enhanced by 60~300% by leveraging cold-spots and the “nano-fin” effect (enhanced surface area). Using silicon nanofins - cooling was enhanced by ~120%. Nano-thermocouples and dioderntemperature nano-sensors integrated with the nanocoatings enabled the study of chaos/ fractal structures in boiling.

Specific heat capacity was enhanced by ~120% using nanofluids. This has applications in the energy technologies, such as: concentrated solar power/ CSP (thermal energy storage/ TES), nuclear, oil and gas exploration (deep drilling, reservoir engineering using nanotracers). Microchannel experiments using nanofluids showed that the precipitated nanoparticles behaved as nanofins (enhanced surface area) that dominate heat transfer for micro/nanoscale flows.

He is an Associate Editor for the ASME Journal of Nanotechnology in Engineering and Medicine (JNEM).