MENTEE – Xiaopeng Bi

I started my bachelor degree of Mechanical Engineering in School of Mechanical Engineering, University of Adelaide in 2015, and graduated by 2018 with awarded First Class Honours. During my undergraduate I participated in Beacon Research Conference with Poster Exhibition of my honours project, and I also volunteered in the “21st Australian Fluid Mechanics Conference 2018” to get engaged with the community that I would work with in the next stage. Now, I upgraded to a PhD candidate receiving full scholarship and Centre for Energy Technology supplementary scholarship, supervised by Professor Graham ‘Gus’ Nathan, working on the topic of “Heat and mass transport in particle-laden flows under conditions of relevance to solar receivers”, (the only PhD  from UofA involved) as a part of an internationally collaborative future solar energy developing project led by Sandia National Laboratories (U.S.) with partnerships from ASTRI, CSIRO, ANU and other industrial partners like Alcoa, IT power and Hatch. This is a fundamental study of complicated fluid mechanics with developing and utilising cutting-edge laser technologies, to experimentally investigate the densely-laden particle-laden flows, potentially employed in many heavy industries.

To date, I have attended multiple academic and industrial events including “Hydrogen Production Technologies Forum” and “The 2nd International Forum on Zero-Carbon High-Temperature Minerals Processing”. Two conference papers are under preparation for one international in Germany and one national in Brisbane 2020 (Both abstracts were accepted). I recently got involved as one of the four PhDs in the application of “Australian-Germany joint research cooperation scheme” with our research partners from the Germany Magdeburg group who is the top in the field relevant to our knowledge, to establish critical thinking, skills and significant international research network towards to future paths.