In Memoriam: Professor Ephraim Maurice Sparrow

Contributed by the Heat Transfer Division of ASME for publication in theJOURNAL OF HEAT TRANSFER. Manuscript received January 23, 2020; final manuscript
received February 7, 2020; published online February 27, 2020. Editor: Portonovo S.
Ayyaswamy.

Journal of Heat Transfer

in his typical manner, very active in pursuing his research interests.
Professor Ephraim M. Sparrow was very active until the last yearof his life. For example, he had these publications in 2019 [12–18].
During his academic career, following Professor W. H. Giedt in1972, Professor Ephraim M. Sparrow served as the Editor of theASME Journal of Heat Transfer until 1980 when this position
was succeeded by Professor K. T. Yang.
In 1979, he cofounded with Professor W. J. Minkowycz thejournal titled Numerical Heat Transfer in order to serve as aforum for the dissemination of ideas and research in the field ofnumerical heat transfer and computational fluid dynamics (CFD).
He was the guest editor on many occasions. For example, he was
the guest editor of a Biomedical-Related Special Issue in theInternational Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer with ProfessorJohn P. Abraham, University of St. Thomas, in November 2008[19]. He was co-author with Professors J. P. Abraham, and R. D.
Lovik in a paper about “Unsteady, three-dimensional fluid
mechanic analysis of blood flow in plaque-narrowed and plaquefreed arteries” in the Biomedical-Related Special Issue [20]. Also,
volume 50, Advances in Heat Transfer was edited by Ephraim M.
Sparrow, John P. Abraham, and John M. Gorman.1 This volume
had six chapters. Professor Ephraim M. Sparrow was the coauthor of the first chapter about “Enhancement of Jet Impingement Heat Transfer by Means of Jet Axis Switching” [21].
Furthermore, the contributions of Professor Ephraim M. Sparrow have spanned many areas and have been recognized bynumerous honors and awards. They include: Max Jakob Memorial
Award in 1976, Member of the National Academy of Engineeringin 1986, Monie A. Ferst Award in 1993, Fellow of the American
Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and the ASME Ralph
Coates Roe Medal.
In July 2020, there will be a Memorial Track of Professor
Ephraim Sparrow for celebrating his life and research contributions. This special symposium will be organized by the Heat
Transfer Division (HTD) in his memory. Contributions for thissymposium are solicited from all pertinent technical topic areas
involving personal recollections from the three programs:
ICNMM 2020, SHTC 2020, and FEDSM 2020 at Rosen Shingle
Creek, Orlando, FL, July 12–15, 2020.2
It is hard to find proper words to express our feelings at this sad
moment, but without any doubt the professional community willremember Professor Ephraim M. Sparrow as an excellent and prolific scientist, teacher, mentor and above all a pleasant and honest
person, and a highly respectful colleague with an outstanding
character and ethics. We will all miss him dearly.
Mohamed M. Awad3
Mem. ASME
Mechanical Power Engineering Department,
Faculty of Engineering,
Mansoura University,
Mansoura 35516, Egypt
e-mail: m_m_awad@mans.edu.eg
Adrian Bejan
Department of Mechanical Engineering andMaterials Science,
Duke University,
Durham, NC 27708-0300
e-mail: abejan@duke.edu
1
https://www.sciencedirect.com/bookseries/advances-in-heat-transfer/vol/50/
suppl/C2
https://event.asme.org/FEDSM/Topics?utm_source=CF&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=10232019_CF_FEDSM&utm_content=SEG0009014&asmepromo=MER0017751
3Corresponding author.

C 2020 by ASME
Copyright V

APRIL 2020, Vol. 142 / 040101-1

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On Thursday Aug. 1, 2019, we weredeeply saddened to hear that Professor
Ephraim M. Sparrow passed away at
the age of 91 years. Professor Ephraim
M. Sparrow was born on May 27, 1928,
and through his extensive professional
career he became one of the best-known
and respected researchers in the field ofheat transfer. He received his B.Sc. andM.S. in 1948 and 1949, respectively,from the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology (MIT). Then, he moved toHarvard University to receive his M.A.
and Ph.D. in 1950 and 1952, respecEphraim Maurice
tively. His Ph.D. thesis is titled “FreeSparrow
Convection With Variable Properties
and Variable Wall Temperature” under the supervision of Professor
Howard Wilson Emmons.
After finishing his Ph.D. in 1952, Professor Ephraim M. Sparrow joined Raytheon, where he worked on different heat transfer
problems such as radar, electronics cooling, and the first microwave oven. Later, he joined the National Advisory Committee for
Aeronautics (NACA) (now National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (NASA)), Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory,Cleveland, OH where he worked on fluid mechanics and heattransfer. He had many publications from his work in NASA suchas two papers [1,2] in the first issue of ASME Journal of Heat
Transfer (JHT), which was published in February 1959 with 15papers, two papers [3,4] in the second issue of JHT (May 1959),
one paper [5] in the third issue of JHT (August 1959), and twopapers [6,7] in the fourth issue of JHT (November 1959).
In 1959, he started his career at the Thermodynamics and HeatTransfer Laboratory (THTL), Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN. THTL wasestablished by Professor Ernst R. G. Eckert in 1950. Within theperiod 1968–1980, Professor Ephraim M. Sparrow served as thefluid mechanics chairman program. Within the period 1986–1988,Professor Ephraim M. Sparrow worked at the National Science
Foundation (NSF), first as Program Manager of Heat Transfer andposteriorly as the CBET division director in the engineering directorate. At NSF, he stressed the need to focus on practical problems
and important fundamental issues. At the time of his death, hewas both the longest serving faculty member and the oldest in theDepartment of Mechanical Engineering, University of Minnesota,
Minneapolis, MN.
During his academic life, Professor Sparrow supervised morethan 250 Master’s degree students and more than 100 doctoral
degree students. Many of his previous Ph.D. graduate students
became professors at well-known universities across the globe.
Professor Sparrow has published many papers, reports, and bookson fluid mechanics, and heat transfer such as Refs. [8] and [9]. His
paper in ASME Journal of Heat Transfer (JHT), which waspublished in May 1977 about “Fully Developed Flow and Heat
Transfer in Ducts Having Streamwise-Periodic Variations ofCross-Sectional Area” [10] was his most cited paper. He pioneered research in many important areas of heat transfer and his
extensive contributions provided tremendous incentive toresearchers and engineers around the world.
In May 1988, Eph’s 60th Birthday was celebrated with an article published in the International Journal of Heat and Mass
Transfer [11]. Following his 60th birthday in 1988 until his deathin 2019, Eph did not show any evidence of slowing down and was,Portonovo Ayyaswamy
Editor, ASME Journal of Heat Transfer,
Department of Mechanical Engineeringand Applied Mechanics,
University of Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia, PA 19104
e-mail: ayya@seas.upenn.edu

Vijay K. Dhir
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department,
Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science,
University of California,
Los Angeles, CA 90095
e-mail: vdhir@seas.ucla.edu
Richard J. Goldstein
Department of Mechanical Engineering,
University of Minnesota,
Minneapolis, MN 55455
e-mail: rjgme@umn.edu

John R. Howell
Department of Mechanical Engineering,
The University of Texas at Austin,
Austin, TX 78712
e-mail: jhowell@mail.utexas.edu
Yogesh Jaluria
Mechanical Engineering Department,
Rutgers University,
Piscataway, NJ 08854
e-mail: jaluria@jove.rutgers.edu
John R. Lloyd
Department of Mechanical Engineering,
College of Engineering,Michigan State University,
East Lansing, MI 48824
e-mail: lloyd@msu.edu
Suhas V. Patankar
Department of Mechanical Engineering,
University of Minnesota,
Minneapolis, MN 55455
e-mail: patan001@umn.edu
Terrence W. Simon
Department of Mechanical Engineering,
University of Minnesota,Minneapolis, MN 55455
e-mail: simon002@umn.edu
Kumar K. Tamma
Department of Mechanical Engineering,
University of Minnesota,
Minneapolis, MN 55455
e-mail: ktamma@umn.edu
Raymond Viskanta
Heat Transfer Laboratory,
School of Mechanical Engineering,Purdue University,
West Lafayette, IN 47907
e-mail: viskanta@ecn.purdue.edu

040101-2 / Vol. 142, APRIL 2020

[1] Sparrow, E. M., and Gregg, J. L., 1959, “A Boundary-Layer Treatment ofLaminar-Film Condensation,” ASME J. Heat Transfer, 81(1), pp. 13–18.
[2] Siegel, R., and Sparrow, E. M., 1959, “Transient Heat Transfer for Laminar
Forced Convection in the Thermal Entrance Region of Flat Ducts,” ASME J.
Heat Transfer, 81(1), pp. 29–36.
[3] Sparrow, E. M., and Gregg, J. L., 1959, “A Theory of Rotating Condensation,” ASME J. Heat Transfer, 81(2), pp. 113–119.
[4] Sparrow, E. M., and Siegel, R., 1959, “A Variational Method for Fully
Developed Laminar Heat Transfer in Ducts,” ASME J. Heat Transfer, 81(2),pp. 157–164.
[5] Sparrow, E. M., and Gregg, J. L., 1959, “Heat Transfer From a Rotating
Disk to Fluids of Any Prandtl Number,” ASME J. Heat Transfer, 81(3), pp.
249–251.
[6] Siegel, R., and Sparrow, E. M., 1959, “Turbulent Flow in a Circular Tube
With Arbitrary Internal Heat Sources and Wall Heat Transfer,” ASME J.
Heat Transfer, 81(4), pp. 280–287.
[7] Sparrow, E. M., and Gregg, J. L., 1959, “Laminar Condensation HeatTransfer on a Horizontal Cylinder,” ASME J. Heat Transfer, 81(4), pp.
291–295.
[8] Sparrow, E. M., and Cess, R. D., 1978, Radiation Heat Transfer, CRC Press,Boca Raton, FL.
[9] Minkowycz, W. J., Sparrow, E. M., and Murthy, J. Y., eds., 2006, Handbookof Numerical Heat Transfer, 2nd ed., Wiley, Hoboken, NJ.
[10] Patankar, S. V., Liu, C. H., and Sparrow, E. M., 1977, “Fully
Developed Flow and Heat Transfer in Ducts Having Streamwise-Periodic
Variations of Cross-Sectional Area,” ASME J. Heat Transfer, 77(2), pp.
180–186.
[11] Minkowycz, W. J., Torrance, K. E., Lloyd, J. R., Hartnett, J. P., Chen, T. S.,and Haji-Sheikh, A., 1988, “Professor Ephraim M. Sparrow on His 60th
Birthday,” Int. J. Heat Mass Transfer, 31(5), pp. 905–906.
[12] Smith, C., Gorman, J., and Sparrow, E., 2019, “Dual Scales of Permeabilityin Regularly Structured Packed Beds of Spheres,” J. Porous Media, 22(10),pp. 1243–1258.
[13] Gorman, J. M., Sparrow, E. M., Katz, S. D. M., and Minkowycz, W. J.,
2019, “Convective Heat Transfer Coefficients on All External Surfaces of aGeneric Residential Building in Crossflow,” Numer. Heat Transfer; Part A:Appl., 75(2), pp. 71–90.
[14] Abraham, J. P., Stark, J., Gorman, J., Sparrow, E., and Minkowycz, W. J.,
2019, “Tissue Burns Due to Contact Between a Skin Surface and Highly
Conducting Metallic Media in the Presence of Inter-Tissue Boiling,” Burns,45(2), pp. 369–378.
[15] Gorman, J. M., Sparrow, E. M., and Ahn, J., 2019, “In-Line Tube-Bank Heat
Exchangers: Arrays With Various Numbers of Thermally ParticipatingTubes,” Int. J. Heat Mass Transfer, 132, pp. 837–847.
[16] Abraham, J. P., Sparrow, E. M., Gorman, J. M., Zhao, Y., and Minkowycz,W. J., 2019, “Application of an Intermittency Model for Laminar, Transitional, and Turbulent Internal Flows,” ASME J. Fluids Eng., 141(7),p. 071204.
[17] Gorman, J. M., Zheng, A., and Sparrow, E. M., 2019, “Bounding Wall
Effects on Fluid Flow and Pressure Drop Through Packed Beds of Spheres,”Chem. Eng. J., 373, pp. 519–530.
[18] Olsen, L. E., Abraham, J. P., Cheng, L., Gorman, J. M., and Sparrow,
E. M., 2019, “Summary of Forced-Convection Fluid Flow and HeatTransfer for Square Cylinders of Different Aspect Ratios Ranging From theCube to a Two-Dimensional Cylinder,” Adv. Heat Transfer, 51,pp. 351–457.
[19] Minkowycz, W. J., 2008, “Biomedical-Related Special Issue,” Int. J. Heat
Mass Transfer, 51(23–24), p. 5477.
[20] Abraham, J. P., Sparrow, E. M., and Lovik, R. D., 2008, “Unsteady, ThreeDimensional Fluid Mechanic Analysis of Blood Flow in Plaque-Narrowed
and Plaque-Freed Arteries,” Int. J. Heat Mass Transfer, 51(23–24), pp.
5633–5641.
[21] Gorman, J. M., Sparrow, E. M., Ghosh, A., and Abraham, J. P., 2018,“Enhancement of jet impingement heat Transfer by Means of Jet Axis
Switching,” Adv. Heat Transfer, 50, pp. 1–41.

Transactions of the ASME

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Abdolhossein Haji-Sheikh
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering,
University of Texas at Arlington,
Arlington, TX 76019
e-mail: haji@uta.edu

References