Carnegie Mellon University

Sheng Shen

Sheng Shen

Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering

Address
5000 Forbes Avenue
Scaife Hall 320
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Bio

Professor Sheng Shen is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, with a background in nanoscale engineering, thermal science, photonics and materials science. Prof. Shen’s research interests include nanoscale thermal transport and energy conversion phenomena, and their applications in solar or thermal energy conversion, thermal management, and multifunctional materials.

The energy transport properties of nanostructures can differ greatly from their bulk counterparts because the characteristic dimensions of nanostructures are often comparable with the wavelength or the mean free path of energy carriers such as photons, phonons and electrons. At the nanoscale, the properties of materials can be engineered to increase the energy density or energy conversion efficiencies. In his recent research, Prof. Shen demonstrated nanoscale thermal radiation exceeding Planck’s law by three orders of magnitude and thermal conductivity of polymer nanofibers three hundred times higher than that of bulk polymers.

Prof. Shen is a recipient of NSF CAREER Award (2013) and DARPA Young Faculty Award (2013). He also received the Philomathia Foundation Research Fellowship in Alternative Energy Research from UC-Berkeley (2010), Hewlett-Packard Best Paper Award from ASME Heat Transfer Division (2008) and Best Paper Award from Julius Springer Forum on Applied Physics (2008).

Education

B.S. 2000, M.S. 2003, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China

Ph.D. 2010, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Post-doc, University of California at Berkeley

Research

Shen's research interests include nanoscale energy transfer/conversion, nanophotonics and renewable energy technologies.

Projects

Sheng's current projects include: 

  • Nanophotonics and Nanoplasmonics
  • Nanoscale Heat Transfer 
  • Multifunctional Materials 
  • Solar Thermal Energy Conversion

Publications

 Liu B, Gong W, Yu B, Li P, Shen S. Perfect thermal emission by nanoscale transmission line resonators.Nano Letters. 2017 Jan 3.

P. Li, S. Yang, T. Zhang, R. Shrestha, K. Hippalgaonkar, T. Luo, X. Zhang, S. Shen, Tunable thermal transport in polysilsesquioxane (PSQ) hybrid crystals, Scientific Reports, 6, 21452, 2016.

 Y. Tan, B. Liu, S. Shen, Z. Yu, Enhancing far-field radiative energy through thermal extraction. Nanophotonics, 1, 22-30, 2016. (Invited review)

J. Shi, B. Liu, P. Li, L-Y. Ng, S. ShenNear-Field Energy Extraction with Hyperbolic Metamaterials, Nano letters 15 (2), 1217-1221, (2015)

F. Ramirez, B. Liu, S. Shen, Extreme blueshift of surface plasmon resonance frequency in graphene nanodisk stacksJournal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer, 158, 27 (2015)

More Publications  Google Scholar  

Sheng Shen, associate professor of mechanical engineering, is working on nanoscale energy transport and nanophotonics at Carnegie Mellon University. In this video, he describes two examples of his research: thermal interface materials for advanced thermal management of microelectronics and control of thermal emission for energy applications.