Mentor Graphics Corporation (NASDAQ: MENT) today announced the winners of its second annual Don Miller Award for Excellence in System-Level Thermo-Fluid Design. The award is named after Don Miller, former research director for British Hydromechanics Research (now BHR Group) in the U.K., who served as one of the judges. Miller is also the author of Internal Flow Systems, the book which served as the foundation for Mentor Graphics FloMASTER software technology. Award submissions were received from around the world, including entrants from India, China, and Brazil.
The 2016 Don Miller Award winners were selected based on their demonstration of excellence for a range of thermo-fluid design applications, including automotive engine cooling, two-phased refrigeration processes, and rail transport passenger comfort. A team comprising Soujanya Chintalapudi, Sundaram Veeraraghavan, and Sampath Sathish Kumar from Chrysler India Automotive, Pvt. Ltd. received the first place award for their design featured in their SAE paper, Simulation of Split Engine Cooling System. Their design used a FloMASTER simulation model for a new method of developing a split engine cooling system.
Two runners up were selected by the panel of judges. Thiago Rubens Vieria Ebel from the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Department of Mechanical Engineering in Brazil received his award fora unique application of the FloMASTER tool used to understand the water hammer effects that can occur in a novel refrigeration system. The application was described in his thesis, Viability Analysis and Computational Simulation of a Hydraulic Circuit for a Magnetic Refrigeration System.
The second joint runner-up award went to the team of Yifei Zhu, Yugong Xu, and Xiangdong Chen from the School of Mechanical Electronic and Control Engineering, Beijing Jiao Tong University in Beijing, China. They investigated the interaction between the external environment and the internal air flow through the ventilation of a high-speed train during operation. They described it in their paper, Study On the One-Dimensional Carriage and Ventilation System of High-Speed Train,
“We congratulate this year’s winners of our annual Don Miller Award for excellence in thermo-fluid design applications, and we are impressed by the broad range of submissions from our FloMASTER customers worldwide,” stated Roland Feldhinkel, general manager of Mentor Graphics Mechanical Analysis Division. “We are proud of the innovations made possible by the use of our technology, and we look forward to reviewing next year’s FloMASTER award submissions.”