John Crepeau, Ph.D., P.E.
Professor of Mechanical Engineering
University of Idaho
1776 Science Center Drive
Idaho Falls, ID 83402
Tel: (208)282-7955
Fax: (208)282-7950
Email: crepeau@uidaho.edu
Right: The “mugshot,” circa 1996.
French (Crépeau): nickname for someone with curly hair, from a derivative of the Latin crispus, “curly-haired.”
Dictionary of American Family Names, Oxford University Press
ISBN 0-19-508137-4
My colleague Ali Siahpush and I described the effect that the internal (volumetric) heat generation
has on the movement and location of a solid-liquid phase change front.
"Approximate solutions to the Stefan problem with internal heat generation" was published by
the journal Heat and Mass Transfer.
Josef Stefan, despite being eponymous for the Stefan-Boltzmann constant, the Stefan Number, the Stefan Problem, and the Stefan current
among other things, is not a well-known figure in the scientific community at-large.
This technical biography, "Josef Stefan: His life and legacy in the thermal sciences",
describes such contributions as his
empirical discovery of the T4 radiation law, which was later derived by his
student Ludwig Boltzmann, his first accurate measurements of the thermal conductivity of gases, and
his studies of ice formation on the polar caps.
A less technical version of the paper, "From Rags to Research, the life of Josef Stefan", was published in bridges, a publication of the Office of Science and Technology of the Austrian Embassy of the United States.
Click on the thumbnail to see a full size version of the image which won the 2002 Kodak Award from the Visualization Society of Japan,
and a brief synopsis of the phenomenon.
The paper, "Dye-bubble interactions in an open channel flow", which describes the experiments that produced the image, appeared in Heat and Mass Transfer.
In studying the mechanics of fluids in nuclear reactors, we developed a set of similarity equations
for buoyant flows driven by internal heat generation.
What makes these similarity solutions unique is the exponentially decaying
heat generation term.
After beginning at the University of Idaho, I was asked by the Idaho National Laboratory to study the drying of
spent nuclear fuel.
Some of our results were published showing an efficient drying method.
For my graduate and postgraduate studies I applied Powell and Percival's concept of the Spectral Entropy
to various systems in order
to quantify their self-organization. The first paper used spectral entropy concepts to analyze three dynamical systems,
the second used spectral entropy to analyze turbulent time series data, and the third was a comparison of spectral and thermodynamic entropy.