International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 58 (2013) 1–2

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International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijhmt

In Celebration

Professor John Richard Thome on his 60th birthday

Prof. John R. Thome is a well-known expert in the ﬁeld of twophase ﬂows and heat transfer, and is highly respected among hiscolleagues all over the world. He was born in Easton, PA. USA on
February 25, 1953. His research spans nearly all areas of boilingand condensation and two-phase ﬂows, covering both internal
ﬂows and external ﬂows, enhanced heat transfer and micro/macro-scale heat transfer. He has made outstanding contributions
to two-phase ﬂow and heat transfer, through his research, reference books, teaching, and engineering science and application.
He is a Professor of Heat and Mass Transfer at the Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland since 1998,
where his primary research interests are two-phase ﬂow and heattransfer, covering both macro-scale and micro-scale heat transfer(boiling and condensation) and enhanced heat transfer. Prof.
Thome is director of the Laboratory of Heat and Mass Transfer atthe EPFL with a research staff of about 18–20 and is also Directorof the EPFL Doctoral Programme in Energy. Until the end of 2011,
he was also the Director of the ERCOFTAC European Coordination
Center (European Research Community On Flow, Turbulence AndCombustion) with about 180 afﬁliated universities, research centers and industrial companies. He was the host of the recent 8thECI International Boiling and Condensation Heat Transfer Conference in June 2012. He is the Swiss delegate to the Assembly of
the International Heat Transfer Conference, which organizes theInternational Heat Transfer Conference every four years. He is associate editor of Heat Transfer Engineering and editorial board member of International Journal of Microcale & Nanoscale Thermal andFluid Transport Phenomena (IJMNTFTP).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijheatmasstransfer.2012.10.042

Prof. Thome received his Ph.D. at Oxford University, England in1978 and was then an assistant/associate professor at Michigan
State University. From 1984 to 1998, he ran a successful international engineering consulting company, until returning to academia in 1998 with his appointment at the EPFL. He is the authorof four widely used books: Enhanced Boiling Heat Transfer (Hemisphere/Taylor & Francis, 1990), Convective Boiling and Condensation,
3rd Edition (Oxford University Press, 1994 with J.G. Collier), Wolverine Engineering Databook III (free e-book, 2004 and updated annually, with 21 chapters and over 200 embedded videos) and Nucleate
Boiling on Micro-Structured Surfaces (free e-book, 2008 with M.E.
Poniewski). He received the ASME Heat Transfer Division’s Best Paper Award in 1998 for a 3-part paper on two-phase ﬂow and ﬂow
boiling heat transfer published in the Journal of Heat Transfer. He
has received the J&E Hall Gold Medal from the UK Institute ofRefrigeration in 2008 for his extensive work on microscale refrigeration heat transfer and the 2010 ASME Heat Transfer Memorial
Award for his career work on ﬂow pattern based heat transfer models for macro and micro-scale ﬂows. He has published more than
170 journal papers with more than 3830 citations since joining
the EPFL in 1998. He also hosts an annual one-week summer
school on ‘‘Microscale Single- and Two-Phase Flow and Heat Transfer’’ each June at the EPFL and bi-annually also hosts the ‘‘Boiling’’course at the EPFL.
Most of his research interests are directed on the joint topic oftwo-phase ﬂow and two-phase heat transfer, his group at the LTCM
lab is one of the world’s premier research groups in his area. He has
proposed many widely used prediction methods for: ﬂow pattern

2In Celebration / International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 58 (2013) 1–2

maps in macro- and micro-channels, ﬂow boiling and condensation in macro- and micro-channels and ﬂattened tubes, criticalheat ﬂux, two-phase pressure drops, entrainment, void fraction,enhanced pool boiling heat transfer, bundle boiling heat transfer,falling ﬁlm evaporation and dryout, falling ﬁlm condensation, mixture boiling effects, oil effects on two-phase heat transfer, ﬂow
boiling in microﬁn tubes, ﬂow boiling of CO2 and pressure dropin U-bends, etc. His CO2 ﬂow pattern based ﬂow boiling heat transfer model for macro- and micro-scale channels has been found tobe highly accurate for CO2 ﬂow boiling and is being used to simulate CO2 cooling of the new generation of particle detectors indevelopment at CERN, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Lab andthe Fermi lab. He is also active in numerical modeling of two-phaseﬂows, including work on condensation in circular and non-circular
microchannels and micro-gravity ﬂows, and a new 3D/ALE-FEM
numerical code for two-phase ﬂow and evaporation in microchannels. His experimental activities now cover micro-PIV of singleand two-phase ﬂows in microchannels and oriﬁces, in addition toannular down-ﬂows. He has proposed the ﬁrst ﬂow pattern-based
suite of macroscale methods for predicting ﬂow pattern transitions, ﬂow boiling heat transfer, condensation heat transfer andtwo-phase pressure drops. He has also proposed the leading methods for ﬂow boiling and critical heat ﬂux in microchannels, justnow adding a ﬂow pattern-based model to this topic and has also
just developed the ﬁrst experimentally-validated simulation toolfor combined heat spreading and ﬂow spreading for multichannel
micro-evaporators with non-uniform heat ﬂuxes and hotspots. He
has in recent years also proposed the ﬁrst uniﬁed suite of annular
ﬂow models for predicting void fraction, entrainment, liquid ﬁlm
thickness, convective heat transfer and pressure drops in macroand microscale annular ﬂows, which so far are also proving there
is not macro-to-microscale transition in annular ﬂow. Recently,
he has also extended his experimental research to cover two-phaseﬂow control for electronics cooling and new hybrid cooling cycles,
using speed control on oil-free pumps and compressors. His workis widely used in engineering practice in diverse industries: refrigeration, air-conditioning, petrochemical, nuclear, electronics cooling, high energy physics particle detectors, LNG, etc.
On the occasion of his 60th birthday, on behalf of his colleagues,students and friends all over the world, we all wish John a very
happy birthday and happiness with his wife Carla and sons Lucaand Alessandro. Sixty is still a young age for John, as he is very active in his research and teaching covering several important topics
in heat transfer and continues to make outstanding achievements
in heat transfer research, education, engineering practice and design, and publications. He has an unending enthusiasm for researchon fundamental two-phase heat transfer and his personality (hardworking, easy-going, open minded, friendly and funny) makes it apleasure to work with him. Besides, he is very nice and friendly

person, even when it has nothing to do with two-phase ﬂows.
We all wish his best on his birthday, and we look forward to his
continued achievements in research in the ﬁeld of two phase ﬂow
and heat transfer.
Lixin Cheng
School of Engineering, University of Portsmouth,Portsmouth PO1 3DJ, UKTel.: +44 239 284 2583; fax: +44 239 284 2351.
E-mail address: lixincheng@hotmail.com
Gian Piero Celata
ENEA CR CASACCIA, Italy
Afshin Ghajar
Oklahoma State University, USAAnthony M. Jacobi
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USATassos G. Karayiannis
Brunel University, UKJosua Meyer
University of Pretoria, South Africa
W.J. Minkowycz
University of Illinois at Chicago, USA
Jesús Moreno Quibén
Wolverine Lda, Portugal
Jung Eung Park
Applied Materials Switzerland, SA, Switzerland
Rémi Revelin
INSA Lyon, France
Gherhardt Ribatski
University of São Paulo, Brazil
Thierry Ursenbacher
College of Engineering and Architecture of Fribourg, Switzerland
Leszek Wojtan
Friotherm AG, Switzerland
Chien-Yuh Yang
National Central University, Taiwan, ROCIztok Zun
University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Available online 29 November 2012