M2i is proud to announce that on November 25th, 2020, Camila Gomez defended her PhD thesis “Heat transfer and boiling phenomena during quenching by water jet impingement”. The project was a collaboration between M2i, NWO-I, TATA Steel, and TU Eindhoven. Camila obtained her PhD cum laude, making her the first woman to ever receive a Mechanical Engineering cum laude PhD in TU/e.
The motivation of her PhD project lies in the Run Out Table. In the Run Out Table, hundreds of meters long, red hot, steel strips are quenched cooled by impingement of hundreds of water jets, while moving at speeds between 2 and 22 m/s. This process is as chaotic as you imagine, but it must also be carefully controlled. The cooling profile in the ROT must be carefully designed and predicted in order to reach the steel microstructure that will result in the desired mechanical properties for each different steel grade. During this project, Camila performed an experimental study with the aim to increase our understanding of the boiling activity and heat transfer during quenching, with the final goal of upgrading the ROT process control systems. A new experimental setup was designed to mimic the ROT in the lab, allowing us to quench cool surfaces moving at speeds up to 8 m/s while visualizing with detail the boiling activity in the steel surface. The result of her project is a general picture of the phenomena that take place during quenching, answering both academic and industrial questions. If you want to know how is liquid water able to contact surfaces at 900 °C or why sometimes you should cool using hot water, feel free to read the complete PhD thesis (available here).
Camila started her PhD in 2016 at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at TU Eindhoven. Before starting her PhD, she studied Chemical Engineering at the University of Alicante and followed the Process and Product Design PDEng program in TU/e.
We would like to wish Camila success in her future carrier.