UK National Heat Transfer Committee

Professor David B. R. Kenning joined Oxford University and Lincoln College in 1968 and was the College's first Fellow in Engineering Science. David held major offices as Senior Tutor and Sub-Rector, while retaining the perfect balance between original research and the importance of undergraduate engineering education. He retired from Oxford University and soon after, joined Brunel University London as a Visiting Professor. Professor Kenning had long-standing formal and informal collaborations with a number of colleagues across the world, including a visiting fellowship supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science at Tokyo University in 2003. He carried out research on multiphase flow and heat transfer for over 40 years, particularly on fundamental studies of boiling mechanisms based on localised measurements. He worked with colleagues in the United States, Japan and Slovenia on chaos and nucleation site interactions in pool boiling, based on the first quantitative analysis of spatio-temporally resolved measurements of wall temperature by liquid crystal thermography at Oxford, extended later to high-speed IR thermography at Ljubljana. He continued this work while at Brunel working on a numerical and experimental study of pool boiling heat transfer with controlled arrays of nucleation sites on silicon surfaces in collaboration the University of Edinburgh, Ljubljana and colleagues from the Los Alamos National Laboratory. David worked closely with researchers at Heriot Watt University to obtain the first spatio-temporally resolved measurements of wall temperature and heat flux fields under sliding vapour bubbles. He also worked on flow boiling in mini/micro-channels for over fifteen years at Oxford and Brunel and obtained the first simultaneous measurements of local variations in wall temperature and pressure at several axial positions synchronised with high-speed videos, making it possible to track the pressure pulse travelling with a liquid slug, quantified the influence of inlet flow compressibility and provided evidence of local transient dryout at low mass flow rates, even at low heat fluxes. Prof Kenning co-author with colleagues from Paderborn University, a reference chapter on Pool Boiling in the latest English edition of the German Heat Atlas, published by Springer. A summary of his achievements can be viewed here.