Nicholas Hines

Mr. Hines has expertise in the areas of mechanical engineering, heat transfer, thermodynamics, and micro/nano-scale thermal physics; he also has extensive experience with experimental characterization, uncertainty analysis, and computational modeling of thermal and thermomechanical systems. He applies the fundamentals of heat transfer, thermodynamics, material science and mathematical modeling to investigate performance, degradation, and failure of electronics and thermal fluid systems.

Mr. Hines has completed the requirements for a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and his degree will be conferred in December 2023. As a Graduate Research Assistant, he utilized advanced optical and electrical thermometry techniques to characterize the thermal properties of semiconductor materials and the operating temperature of wide bandgap (WBG) semiconductor devices for power and radio frequency (RF) electronics applications. Furthermore, he utilized experimentally validated thermal finite element analysis (FEA) to develop novel device-level thermal management solutions for WBG semiconductor devices. Mr. Hines also utilized non-destructive optical stress metrology techniques to characterize the accumulated residual stress distribution within gallium nitride (GaN) thin films resulting from lattice mismatch and coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) mismatch during material growth and processing.

Experimentally, Mr. Hines has experience with characterization techniques including Raman spectroscopy, photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy, electrical semiconductor characterization systems, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and various thermal property characterization techniques. Computationally, Mr. Hines has experience with advanced numerical modeling techniques including steady-state and transient thermal FEA, nonlinear regression analysis, and Monte Carlo simulation, using high performance computing (HPC) resources.

Prior to his graduate studies, Mr. Hines worked as a mechanical engineering intern at Corning Incorporated, where he designed and prototyped an experimental apparatus that utilized localized thermal expansion to enhance defect detection in glass films to support product reliability. He also worked in the aerospace industry as a mechanical engineering intern at GE Aerospace, where he contributed to jet engine turbine thermal management and additive manufacturing process control for ceramic core die production for airfoil die casting.