Jackson Minnick

Author: Jackson Minnick | Major: Mechanical Engineering | Semester: Fall 2024

My name is Jackson Minnick. I am a senior in Mechanical Engineering with Aerospace concentration, in addition to a music minor. My research mentor is Dr. Han Hu, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. I have been working with Dr. Hu since summer of 2023, and have gotten the opportunity to get involved in multiple different projects that interest me, ranging from additive manufacturing to thermal materials/management, and more.
This past semester, I have been performing research on thermal resistance testers
following the ASTM D5470 standard. My goal is to characterize physical components of thermal resistance testers that were constructed rather than bought by analyzing their effect on the fidelity of the test results generated on multiple different trials. During this term, I plan to make strategic purchases of various upgrade materials, install them on the
in-house thermal resistance tester, and analyze changes in the data produced. These trials
will allow me to produce a “SUP”, or Standard Upgrade Progression, for house-made
thermal resistance testers built around the ASTM D5470 standard.
My reasoning for selecting this topic stems from previous work I have performed on the
tester in Dr. Hu’s lab facility. Towards the end of my undergraduate research internship, I
was tasked with upgrading the structure and components of the tester. However, without
true scientific backing for some of the upgrades, Dr. Hu rightly recommended hesitation
regarding beginning the purchase and manufacturing phase. My return to thermal
resistance research is slightly embellished compared to previous efforts, as I currently aim
to characterize individual upgrades for the purpose of generating a standard procedure,
rather than implementing them only to increase the accuracy and precision of one testing
apparatus.
Throughout this past semester, a large portion of my research has been purely literary,
which has proved much more challenging than what was initially expected. Apart from
official documentation on the D5470 standard published by ASTM, information on upgrade
processes to non-commercial testers is not common. To overcome this apparent gap in the
body of knowledge, I considered both commercial and private publications as relevant to
this study and adapted the upgrade and maintenance process of commercial testers to the
smaller scale which is used here. For example, one of the most important upgrades for a
commercial thermal resistance tester is a precise alignment tool or jig to ensure that the
thermal transfer area is equal to the cross-sectional area of the sample, and that the two
are not misaligned. This is commonly accomplished with a precision-machined, potentially
automated loading mechanism, but would prove both impractical and cost-ineffective in a
smaller, student lab setting. To remedy this issue, I have included the option to 3-D print a
loading jig as an upgrade opportunity. This was actually completed during my research
internship and proved to be the most significant motivator of result fidelity that I witnessed.
Although some significant breakthroughs have been made thus far, such as an unexpected
non-issue of radiative losses and subsequent upgrade priority adjustment, a lack of testing
and an emphasis on literary review and preparation for purchase and trial has revealed to
me that I perform my best in true laboratory conditions when using advanced
instrumentation and performing trials and tests. Although that is the next step in this
project, the road to get there has been tedious.
Dr. Hu’s instruction on heat transfer and the mechanisms behind thermal resistance
testing during my summer research experience have been paramount in properly
interpreting scholarly literature on the topic during the initialization of this project, and his
commitment to student discovery through regular access to the lab both has been and will
prove to be extremely beneficial. Even if the remainder of the testing phase does not
produce the results that are hypothesized, the emphasis on education and learning
through research regardless of the results that Dr. Hu pushes means that this project will
be a success no matter what materializes following the finalization of testing.
I plan to continue planning upgrades and making material purchases for installation on the
in-house tester in preparation for testing to be completed. If the testing phase is successful
and produces results with enough statistical significance to indicate a correlation between
the upgrades, their order of installation, and the result fidelity, students and professional
researchers will be equipped with beneficial knowledge regarding the most practical and
cost effective methods to more closely align their testers with the intended standard and,
in doing so, produce results that are more accurate and precise, providing a significant
benefit for nearly all research done on solid thermal materials.