Special Issue on Heat and Mass Transfer in Biosystems

Abstract

The involvement of the heat transfer community in the research related to heat and mass transfer in biosystems increases rapidly and covers a wide variety of applications. While the past involved mainly topics of cryogenics and other related fields the current involvement is substantially wider and covers diverse biological fields and applications. The present special issue dedicated to heat and mass transfer in biosystems captures only a portion of this wide topical potential for biosystems research. The objective of this special issue is to report the state of the art on some of the research conducted in this field and motivate the heat transfer community, which is uniquely qualified to make a valuable contribution in providing fundamental understanding of transport of heat, mass, and momentum occurring in biological and biologically inspired systems, to become more involved in this field of research. In particular, applying the engineering way of thinking can be especially useful in developing the fundamental understanding, the governing principles, mechanistic explanations, and predictive modeling for functioning of biological systems. Application of the engineering point of view (through identification, formulation, and solution to bioengineering problems as well as designing machines and systems based on fundamental conservation laws) can usefully complement many biological research efforts and lead to new breakthroughs in this area. Among the topics covered in this special issue are targeted drug delivery, heat generation in nanoparticles with potential application to cancer treatment, tissue engineering by using irreversible electroporation to minimize tissue damage due to Joules heating, temperature distribution in cryosurgery, facilitating transdermal drug delivery via skin electroporation, modeling of microorganism growth including the lag phase, human eye response to thermal disturbances, modeling of bioheat transfer, formation of organelle traps in an axon providing a mechanistic explanation of the onset of Alzheimers disease, the use of micro-cantilever biosensors for detection of microorganisms, and the application of the constructal theory to biophysical systems.