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After G.P. "Bud" Peterson graduated from college and worked for awhile at a consulting firm, he decided to change course. Rather than practicing engineering, he set out to get his Ph.D. and make a career of teaching and research. Thermodynamics, a complex field only the most analytical minds can love, caught his fancy. Along the way, though, another side of his persona led him to managerial positions at college engineering departments. Call it a classic yin and yang situation.

Usually, people have to make a decision between diverging paths at some point in their career, but Peterson has found a home in each of these disparate areas and flourished in both. He serves as provost at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Somehow, he also finds time to work as a professor and researcher in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Nuclear Engineering and head the Two-Phase Heat Transfer Lab at the school in upstate New York. In his research, he has pioneered micro heat pipes.

In taking on the managerial roles that have come up, Peterson has developed a strategy for keeping things in perspective. "I've made the statement as I've moved from one position to another that 'well, I'll try this, and if I don't like it, the worst thing that can happen is I have to go back to teaching and research, which is what I came here for.' It's really a great situation to be in."

Peterson, 50, grew up in Prairie Village, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City. His penchant for dual roles revealed itself when he attended Kansas State University on a football scholarship and received B.S. degrees in mechanical engineering and mathematics. While pursuing his master's degree, he worked various jobs, including a stint at Kansas Technical Institute (now Kansas State University-Salina) as an assistant professor of mechanical engineering technology. After getting his master's in engineering from Kansas State, Peterson landed a position as engineering professor at Texas A&M University in 1981, and he received his Ph.D. from the school in 1985. He would go on to spend 20 years at Texas A&M before moving to RPI in 2000.

The first leadership role for Peterson came at Kansas Technical Institute when the general engineering technology department head resigned, and they asked him to take the position. When he left there, he says, "I thought I was going back to get a Ph.D. and do research the rest of my life. And I like it very much, and I'm still doing some."

But when he went to Texas A&M, the school asked him to take various leadership positions. He became Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Associate Vice Chancellor for the Texas A&M University System, and Executive Associate Dean of the College of Engineering. "It just kind of happened. It's not something I really set out to do," he recalls. "I enjoy some parts of it tremendously, and there are some parts I don't like quite as much."

One area Peterson thoroughly enjoys is thermodynamics. "I tell my students I don't know how people can go through life without understanding thermodynamics. The reality is, in fact they can't. Regardless of your background, you understand a lot about thermodynamics," he relates. To show that, he talks about how a drop of water dances on a frying pan when you intuitively place it there to see if the pan is hot enough to cook eggs. "Thermodynamics is really just a subset of physics, and physics explains an awful lot of what's going on around us. I just find it very entertaining."

This love of thermodynamics turned Peterson on to heat pipes during the summer of 1981, when he got a fellowship as a visiting research scientist at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. He had heard a little about heat pipes in 1980, when NASA called and asked if he knew anything about them in evaluating him for the position. One of those spontaneous, almost comical moments occurred that may have altered Peterson's career. When the phone rang, he delayed the interviewer for an hour because he had a meeting. He finished his meeting in 45 minutes and then found all the books he could on heat pipes. "In about 15 minutes, I read everything I could find on heat pipes," he says. After the chat, they said he knew more about heat pipes than most people they talked to and wanted him to come down. His summer assignment was to develop an analytical technique to determine the priming capability of high capacity heat pipes in reduced gravity environments.

Invented in 1964 for use in thermal control on spacecraft, heat pipes consist of a finned sealed tube partially filled with refrigerant. They typically work as a heat exchanger, as warm air flows over one end and creates a continuous refrigeration process in which the warmer end acts as an evaporator and the other a condenser. The fluid in the warmer end evaporates and drifts to the colder end, where it condenses and then flows back down to the warmer end to start the process over again. Air flowing over the condenser end gets cooled. Larger heat pipes often see use in building HVAC equipment to transfer heat between two air streams. Because of the phase change, Peterson says, heat pipes have "a tremendous capacity for absorbing and transferring heat and energy." He describes them as "devices that use no external power, that look incredibly simple but are extremely complex."

Peterson and others he has worked with have made their mark by miniaturizing heat pipes, creating micro versions. As he tells it, in 1989, a Japanese magazine article said it wasn't possible to make heat pipes smaller than four millimeters in diameter -- at the time, they were testing a heat pipe one millimeter in diameter. Until then, heat pipes used a wicking structure on the inner wall of the pipe to allow the fluid to move efficiently from one end to the other. "You can use sharp channels -- square or triangular channels -- that can serve as a capillary artery. You replace the wicking structure with longitudinal arteries. We've made them 20 microns in diameter."

Early on, Peterson saw great potential for micro heat pipes. "At the time I started working on these, almost all the applications were limited to space craft thermal control. One of the great decisions I made in my life and career was to take this idea of phase change heat transfer and heat pipes and focus it on the application of the thermal control of electronic devices. Today, if you've got a lap top computer, it's probably got a heat pipe in it. And in some ways, I think some of the work I did helped facilitate that. The heat pipe takes heat from the Pentium processor and spreads it out over the bottom surface to dissipate it."

Attention now has shifted to other applications, Peterson reveals. "I'm looking at biological applications. We've just started looking at trying to arrest epileptic seizures by rapid cooling of small regions of the brain." An increase in the electrical activity of the brain causes seizures, and if you cool a portion of the brain, you can reduce the electrical activity. The problem is, you have to cool a small region of the brain without significantly increasing the temperature of any other portion because it will destroy tissue.

Peterson currently holds nine patents on heat pipes, both standard size and micro and spanning diverse arenas. A bellows heat pipe conducts heat away from electronic components to a heat sink, operating as a thermal switch to cool the components. A heat transfer cylinder uses heat pipes to provide a constant temperature surface for use in the paper industry for drying, rolling, or otherwise processing a work piece. Heat pipes 35 microns in diameter can be fabricated as an integral part of semiconductors to collect the heat from localized hot spots and dissipate it over the entire chip surface. A heat pipe catheter the size of a hypodermic needle assures constant temperature operation within a therapeutic temperature range for use in hyperthermia cancer treatments and may be used to treat cancerous tumors in body regions previously untreatable.

As provost at RPI, Peterson serves as the chief academic officer and has principle responsibility for the academic programs and curriculum, courses, and faculty. "Anything that has anything to do with academics falls under the auspices of the provost. It's really like vice president for academics," he says.

One thing that enticed Peterson to RPI as provost was being part of a mission to implement The Rensselaer Plan. Adopted in 2000, this strategic, long-range vision serves as the basis for each year's operating plan and budget with the goal "to make Rensselaer a top-tier, world-class technological research university with global reach and global impact," as he puts it. In Peterson's three years there, the school has already seen results. "We have hired over 105 new faculty, 50 of those in new positions. The SAT scores of incoming freshmen have increased dramatically. We're building many new buildings. We've increased externally-funded research by about 25 or 30 percent." He continues, "We've dramatically increased the diversity of the faculty, and we're making improvements in the diversity of the student population. We're kind of strange in that we're growing, expanding, and enhancing our programs, while many universities are forced to cut back."

With results like this, Peterson may never get back to teaching and researching full time, and he may accomplish as much in this arena as he has in the lab. With his love of thermodynamics and success with heat pipes, it wouldn't be such a bad thing if he does return to pure engineering, but then again, with his signature yin-and-yang path, he may have perfected the ideal scenario.

Progressive Engineer
Editor: Tom Gibson
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©2004 Progressive Engineer