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Contact:
Phone:
(518) 276-6620 |
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Email:
smithr@rpi.edu
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Mailing Address:
Jonsson Engineering Center
rm: 3018
110 8th Street
Troy, New York
12180 |
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Department Affiliations:
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Education:
- Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley
Mechanical Engineering
- M.S., University of California at Berkeley
Mechanical Engineering
- B.A., Rice University
Mechanical Engineering
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Professional Background:
Richard Smith received a B.A. in Mechanical Engineering from Rice University and the M.S. and a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley. Prof. Smith has had a wide variety of experiences in many elements of engineering education, including research, teaching, curriculum development and academic administration during his 34 year professional career, most of which has been spent at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as a faculty member in the (now named) Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering. His research and teaching expertise has been in heat transfer and thermal-fluid sciences, with research applications in manufacturing and materials processing, especially solidification processing, as well as energy utilization and conversion, and his activities have been centered in the Heat Transfer Division of ASME. In 2004, he completed a 3-year appointment as Program Director for the Thermal Transport Program in the Chemical and Transport Systems Division of the National Science Foundation. For the last four-plus years, he has served as Associate Dean of Engineering for Academic and Student Affairs at Rensselaer, where he has responsibility for the full spectrum of the educational enterprise for 3200 undergraduate students in 12 engineering majors within 7 academic departments. Prof. Smith also serves as a Program Evaluator representing ASME to the Engineering Accreditation Commission of ABET. He recently completed service on the ASME Task Force on Graduate Education, organized under the Committee for Education of ASME, which addressed, among other things, the goals, objectives and implementation strategies that ASME should adopt with respect to its graduate student and graduate education agendas. He currently serves on the ASME Vision 2030 Committee, whose goals include 1) to define the knowledge and expertise that an ME graduate should have to be globally competitive in the 21st century, and 2) to provide recommendations on the features of an ME curriculum that will provide the needed knowledge and skills.
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Research:
- Thermodynamics
- Fluids
- Energy Systems/Multiphase Phenomena
- Energy
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Professor Smith's general interests are in the areas of heat transfer, fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, materials processing, and energy conversion. His current activities are directed toward heat transfer with solid-liquid phase change, for which applications include casting and welding and materials processing, thermal storage, nuclear safety, cryosurgery; however, the principal recent focus has been materials processing. He has contributed to understanding the dynamics of "mushy zones" (solid-liquid two phase region) formed during alloy solidification, to determine the relationships between macroscopic heat transfer and fluid mechanics processes and the resulting solid material properties.
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Awards: |
- Fellow, American Society of Mechanical Engineers
- Rensselaer Distinguished Teaching Fellow
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In 1990, Dr. Smith was named a Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Rensselaer, and in 1993 he received the MANE Department's Lewis T. Assini Teaching and Advising Award. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and was named "Outstanding Reviewer" of the ASME Journal of Heat Transfer in 2000. He served as Chair of the K-19 Committee on Transport Phenomena in Manufacturing and Materials Processing ASME Heat Transfer Division, and he currently serves on the Long Range Directions and the Government Relations (Chair) Committees. He is also an active member of the American Society of Engineering Education. |
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