Haotian Jia

Haotian Jia is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Tufts University. His research, supervised by Professor Marc Hodes and co-advised by Professor Georgios Karamanis, focused on the momentum and mass transfer process inside nanoporous media (i.e., aerogels) experiencing Knudson effect, and study the transport phenomena using the tools of applied mathematics.

Haotian earned his B.S. in Machine Design & Manufacturing and Automation from Beijing Forestry University (BJFU) in July 2018 and joined Professor Marc Hodes’s group at Tufts as a research assistant in March 2019. His research interests lie in using the tools of applied mathematics to understand and solve the momentum, heat, and mass transfer problems from the engineering field. Haotian has worked on developing an apparatus to measure the permeability of nanoporous media aerogels using redundant methods and demonstrating mass transfer enhancement of the ambient-pressure freeze drying of aerogels experiencing the Knudsen effect through jet impingement. Haotian is currently working on two projects: using photoresponsive surfactants and light to induce Marangoni stress and enhance flow lubrication on superhydrophobic surface microchannels, and using asymptotic expansion to solve the flow field of a vapor and liquid phase in an axial groove heat pipe problem, including adding first-order corrections to previous work done by Hodes et al. In the summer of 2022, Haotian traveled to Imperial College London through the Tufts Global Research Assistant Program and collaborated closely with Dr. Michael Mayer and Professor Toby Kirk at Imperial College London on these two projects, respectively.