Most people take boiling water for granted. For Associate Professor Matteo Bucci, discovering the physics behind cooking has been a decade-long journey filled with unexpected challenges and modern insights.
This seemingly elementary phenomenon is extremely tough to study in sophisticated systems such as nuclear reactors, yet it underlies many critical industrial processes. Unlocking its secrets could therefore enable advances in competent energy production, electronics cooling, water desalination, medical diagnostics, and more.
“Cooking is important for applications beyond nuclear energy,” says Bucci, who started an internship at MIT in July. “Boiling is used in 80 percent of power plants that generate electricity. My research has implications for space propulsion, energy storage, electronics and the increasingly important task of cooling computers.”
Bucci’s lab has developed modern experimental techniques to shed featherlight on a wide range of boiling and heat transfer phenomena that have restricted energy projects for decades. The most critical of them is the problem resulting from the rapid formation of bubbles, which create a vapor band on the surface that prevents further heat transfer. In 2023, Bucci and colleagues developed unifying principle solving a problem called the boiling crisis, which could enable more competent nuclear reactors and prevent catastrophic accidents.
For Bucci, every advance brings modern opportunities and modern questions to answer.
“What is the best paper?” Bucca asks. “The best article is the next one. I think Alfred Hitchcock used to say that it doesn’t matter how good your last movie was. If the next one is weak, people won’t remember it. I always tell my students that our next job should always be better than the last one. It’s a constant journey of improvement.”
From engineering to bubbles
The Italian village where Bucci grew up had approximately 1,000 inhabitants during his childhood. He learned his mechanical skills by working in his father’s machine shop and taking apart and reassembling appliances such as washing machines and air conditioners to see what was inside. He also became fascinated with cycling, competing in the sport until he began his bachelor’s and master’s studies at the University of Pisa.
In college, Bucci was fascinated by matter and the origins of life, but he also liked building, so when it came time to choose between physics and engineering, he decided that nuclear engineering would be a good fit.
“My passion is building and understanding how things are made,” says Bucci. “Nuclear engineering was a very unlikely but obvious choice. This was unlikely because in Italy nuclear power had already fallen out of the energy landscape, so there were very few of us. At the same time, there was a combination of intellectual and practical challenges, and that is what I like.”
In order to obtain his doctorate, Bucci went to France, where he met his wife, and then began working in the French national laboratory. One day, his department head asked him to work on a nuclear reactor safety problem known as transient boiling. To solve this problem, he wanted to operate a measurement method pioneered by MIT professor Jacopo Buongiorno, so in 2013 he received a cash grant to become a visiting scientist at MIT. Since then, he has been studying cooking at MIT.
Currently, the Bucci lab is developing modern diagnostic techniques for studying boiling and heat transfer, as well as modern materials and coatings that can boost heat transfer efficiency. The work gave researchers unprecedented insight into conditions inside a nuclear reactor.
“The diagnostics we have developed can accumulate the equivalent of 20 years of experimental work in a one-day experiment,” says Bucci.
This data, in turn, led Bucci to an extremely elementary model to describe the boiling crisis.
“The efficiency of the boiling process on the surface of a nuclear reactor’s mantle determines the reactor’s efficiency and safety,” explains Bucci. “It’s like a car that you want to accelerate, but there is an upper limit. In the case of a nuclear reactor, this upper limit is dictated by boiling heat transfer, so we are interested in understanding what this upper limit is and how we can overcome it to improve reactor efficiency.
Another particularly important area of Bucci’s research is two-phase immersion cooling, a process in which hot parts of a server bring a liquid to a boil and then the resulting vapor condenses on a heat exchanger above, creating a constant, passive cooling cycle.
“It keeps chips cool with minimal energy loss, significantly reducing electricity consumption and carbon emissions in data centers,” explains Bucci. “Data centers emit as much CO2 as the entire aviation industry. By 2040, they will account for more than 10 percent of emissions.”
Supporting students
Bucci says working with students is the most rewarding part of his job. “They have great passion and competence. It’s motivating to work with people who have the same passion as you.”
“My students are not afraid to explore new ideas,” adds Bucci. “They almost never stop before an obstacle – sometimes to the point where you have to tardy them down and get them back on track.”
By running the Red Lab in the Faculty of Nuclear Science and Engineering, Bucci strives to provide students with independence and support.
“We’re not educating students, we’re educating future researchers,” Bucci says. “I think the most important part of our job is not only providing the tools, but also the confidence and self-directed approach to problem solving. These could be business problems, problems with experiments, problems with lab mates.
Some of the more unique experiments that Bucci’s students perform require them to take measurements while free-falling in an airplane to achieve zero gravity.
“Space exploration is a big fantasy for all kids,” says Bucci, who joins students on experiments about twice a year. “This is very fun and inspiring research for students. Zero g gives you a new perspective on life.”
The operate of artificial intelligence
Bucci is also excited about the possibility of using artificial intelligence in his field. In 2023, he was a co-recipient of a multi-university research initiative (MURI) project in thermal sciences dedicated exclusively to machine learning. In a nod to AI’s promise in its field, Bucci recently founded a journal titled Showcasing AI-Powered Research Advances.
“There is no home in our community for people who want to develop machine learning techniques,” Bucci says. “We wanted to create a space for people in computing and thermal science to work together to make progress. I think we really need to get IT people involved in our community to accelerate this process.”
Bucci also believes that artificial intelligence can be used to process extensive amounts of data collected using modern experimental techniques he has developed, as well as to model phenomena that researchers are not yet able to study.
“It is possible that artificial intelligence will enable us to understand things that cannot be observed, or at least guide us into the dark as we try to find the causes of many problems,” Bucci says.