The Nukiyama Memorial Award
Prof. Zuankai Wang as the seventh recipient of the Nukiyama Memorial Award
The 7th Nukiyama Memorial Award for 2024 was awarded to Dr. Zuankai Wang, Professor at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the fields of condensation and boiling heat transfer. His research has provided solutions to four long-standing scientific challenges: dramatically improving condensation heat transfer efficiency, achieving directional droplet propulsion on highly demanding heat transfer surfaces, reaching the physical limits of flow boiling heat transfer, and overcoming the Leidenfrost effect.
The award ceremony and the awardee’s lecture took place at ACTS 2024 (The 3rd Asian Conference on Thermal Sciences) in Shanghai, China, on June 24, 2024. Dr. Wang received a plaque, a certificate, and a prize of 500,000 JPY.
The Nukiyama Memorial Award honors the legacy of Shiro Nukiyama, a pioneering heat transfer scientist. Nukiyama addressed the challenges of boiling phenomena and published a groundbreaking paper that introduced the Nukiyama curve (boiling curve), which clarified the nature of these phenomena. This influential work was conducted in the 1930s when heat transfer research was still in its infancy, and Nukiyama himself was under forty years old. The award is given every two years to a scientist under the age of fifty for outstanding contributions to the field of Thermal Science and Engineering.
The call for nominations for the 7th award was open from June 1, 2023, to September 30, 2023. The Award Committee then evaluated all nominees impartially and rigorously to select the awardee.
| Chairperson | Kazuhiko Suga | (Osaka Metropolitan University, Japan) |
|---|---|---|
| Vice Chairperson | Taku Ohara | (Tohoku University, Japan) |
| Mamoru Tanahashi | (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan) | |
| Catherine Colin | (Institut de Mécanique des Fluides de Toulouse, France) | |
| Janusz S. Szmyd | (AGH University of Science and Technology, Poland) | |
| Gang Chen | (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA) | |
| Chang-Ying Zhao | (Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China) |