University of Nevada, Reno Mechanical Engineering Department

Phone: (775) 784-4873
Fax: (775) 784-1701
Office: Palmer Engineering, Room 213
E-mail: greiner@unr.edu
Website: http://wolfweb.unr.edu/homepage/greiner
Address: Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, MS 312; University of Nevada, Reno; Reno, NV 89557

Thermal engineering; enhanced heat transfer; pool fire heat transfer; nuclear waste transportation safety; heat transfer in chemical processors; advanced hydrogen reformers; gas turbine engine film cooling. ASME Fellow; chair of four ASME conference sessions on Enhanced Heat Transfer.

Relevant past experience

Research funded by NSF, Saudia National Labs, Gas Research Institute, US Dept. of Energy, United Technologies Research Center and Hydrogen Burner Technologies, Inc.; previous employment with Standard Oil Corp. and Brunswick Defense.

An experiment for measuring heat transfer from an accidental transportation fire to a nuclear waste transport cask (left), and a computation simulation of the same fire (right).

Miles Greiner received his Ph.D. in 1986 from MIT. He joined the faculty of the University of Nevada, Reno that same year and is currently Professor of Mechanical Engineering and a Fellow of the ASME. He has taught graduate and undergraduate thermal science courses, engineering mathematics, freshman design, and has developed innovative, low cost methods of teaching instrumentation and experimentation. The University of Nevada, Reno Alumni Association recognized Dr. Greiner as a Senior Mentor in 1989 and 2001. The UNR College of Engineering awarded him the Lemelson Award for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in 2008.

He has written extensively about channel topographies and flow conditions that enhance single-phase heat transfer at low Reynolds numbers without increasing pumping power. Experiments and simulations have documented the development and decay of normally dormant two-dimensional Tollmien-Schlichting waves, and the subsequent development of three-dimensional mixing. These works have led to a basic understanding of flows in which heat transfer augmentation is not coupled with increased pumping power. The National Science Foundation, the Gas Research Institute, and the United Technologies Research Center have funded this work.

Professor Greiner has also performed large-scale experiments and computational studies of heat transfer to massive objects engulfed in pool fires. This work has focused on the interaction between fires, the surrounding wind conditions and the engulfed object. It has led to an understanding of the radiation properties of fires as well as the accuracy of inverse conduction techniques used to measure heat flux in fires. He has used this work as a basis to estimate the response of truck and rail sized nuclear waste transport packages under severe accident conditions. The Department of Energy, Sandia National Laboratories, the Nevada Nuclear Waste Project Office, and Innovative Technologies Solutions Corporation have funded this work. He has also advised the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the State of Nevada on nuclear waste package testing. Based on work in this area, Dr. Greiner received an award for co-authoring the Outstanding Operations, Applications, and Components Technical Paper at the 2003 ASME Pressure Vessel and Piping Conference, and the G.E.O. Widera Award for the 2004 Outstanding Technical Paper in the Journal of Pressure Vessel Technology.

In addition to these topics, Dr. Greiner has performed proprietary research in the areas of gas turbine engine film cooling for Pratt Whitney, and advanced hydrogen reformer design for Hydrogen Burner Technologies Corporation.