ORIGINS OF THE INTERNATIONAL CENTRE FOR HEAT AND MASS TRANSFER

I had the good fortune to be present at a number of meetings leading to the establishment of the International Centre for Heat and Mass Transfer. By a stroke of good luck, I still have the minutes and relevant notes covering these events. Based on these documents, I will attempt to set down a chain of key events which contributed to the birth of the Centre some thirty years ago.

A seminal event is the visit of Robert Maxwell, Publisher of Pergamon Press, to the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California in October 1958, some 40 years ago. During this visit he met with Dr. Carl Gazley and me to discuss new publishing opportunities. We informed Maxwell that the leaders of the U.S. heat transfer research community led by Professor S.P. Kezios were campaigning for a new journal exclusively devoted to heat transfer. Maxwell then noted that he had visited the USSR shortly before coming to RAND and he reported that the Soviets also wanted a heat transfer journal. In light of these considerations, Maxwell dictated a letter appointing Gazley and me to be founding editors of a new international journal devoted to heat transfer to be published by Pergamon Press. This was the opening step in establishing the International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer (IJHMT).

The announcement of the pending International Journal may have contributed to the decision of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) to establish their own heat transfer journal. In any event, the first issue of the ASME Journal of Heat Transfer appeared in February 1959. In the meantime Carl Gazley and I, with the help of Robert Maxwell, were busy organizing a board of editors and an editorial advisory board for the new international journal. In general, we had very positive responses, with the notable exception of the Soviet Union. Although letters of invitation had been sent to some of their top researchers there was no response and we were becoming quite concerned. In early 1959, Professors Myron Tribus (a member of the Honorary Editorial Advisory Board of IJHMT) and Novak Zuber were attending a conference in Geneva on Atoms for Peace where they met a group from Minsk headed by Professor A.V.Luikov. Tribus informed Luikov that the IJHMT was anxiously seeking a Russian editor. Within a few weeks, in April 1959, Luikov accepted the invitation to become an editor, joining D.B. Spalding, A.J.Ede, U.Grigull, C.Gazley and myself. Professors E.R.G. Eckert and O.A. Saunders were Co-Chairmen of the Honorary Editorial Advisory Board.

The first issue of the International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer appeared in June 1960. Shortly thereafter, in August 1960, a meeting of the editors sponsored by Robert Maxwell took place in Oxford, England. All of the editorial board members mentioned above, with the exception of D.P. Spalding attended this session.

The next year - 1961 - was very active on the international heat transfer front. In June of that year the first All-Union Heat and Mass Transfer was held in Minsk. A.V.Luikov, the Conference Chairman, invited a number of foreign visitors including all of the editors of the IJHMT. Many of the invitees took advantage of this unique opportunity to interact with their Soviet colleagues. A few months later, in August, the Second International Heat Transfer Conference, organized by the mechanical and chemical engineering societies of the United Kingdom and the USA on a bilateral basis, took place in Boulder, Colorado. A number of researchers from the USSR were invited to the Boulder meeting. Unfortunately, they were unable to attend, having encountered difficulty in obtaining the official papers needed to travel to the United States. A follow-up meeting associated with the Second International Conference was held in London in January 1962. A large delegation from the Soviet Union, headed by A.V. Luikov from Minsk, attended this meeting.

In this same period, the editors of the IJHMT, which now included Professors E.A. Brun from Paris and Takashi Sato from Kyoto, held a series of meetings in Europe and the U.S., to discuss the International Journal and related matters. The subject of the bi-national organization of the International Conferences came up at these meetings. The editors went on record in support of expanding the planning committee for these conferences to include representatives from other countries active in heat transfer research. This led to discussions in the UK and in the US about the possibility of such restructuring. In 1963, representatives from the mechanical and chemical engineering societies in the US appointed a committee chaired by Professor Eckert to look into the matter. The task of this special committee, which also included Professors S.W. Churchill, T.F. Irvine, J.W. Westwater and myself, was to arrange a meeting on the subject of internationalization. Representatives from countries having an active heat transfer program were invited to attend the session which was scheduled to occur in Chicago on the occasion of the Third International Conference (still organized on a bi-national basis). The committee met in Chicago on August 12, 1966 with leaders of the heat transfer research community from Great Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the USSR. The major recommendation to come out of the meeting was to establish an Assembly for International Heat Transfer Conferences for planning and coordinating international conferences in the field of heat transfer. A set of working rules were proposed for the Assembly. It was agreed that the members present at the meeting would attempt to secure the necessary approval of these plans by their relevant engineering organizations by spring. The formal ratification of the Assembly and its working rules occurred in Paris on April 3, 1967 at a meeting attended by the following delegates:

With the exception of Beatty and Eckert (awaiting approval of the US chemical and mechanical engineering societies), all of above-named participants were officially named delegates to the newly approved Assembly for International Conferences. T.F.Irvine and I attended as observers. The members of the Assembly formally approved the working rules and unanimously elected Professor Brun to be President and Professor Grigull to be Vice President for a term of four years. It was agreed that the Fourth International Conference would be organized by France and the Federal Republic of Germany to take place in Paris in September 1970.

Meanwhile, the Second and Third All-Union Heat Transfer Conferences were held at Minsk in 1964 and 1968, respectively. The Chairman of the Conferences, A.V.Luikov, continued his policy of inviting increasing numbers of foreigners to attend. The 1968 meeting in mid-May 1968 is of special importance to the International Centre for on this occasion Academician A.V. Luilov convened a special meeting to discuss the establishment of an International Summer School in Heat and Mass Transfer to be held annually inYugoslavia. In addition to Luikov, the following were present: S.S. Kutateladze, D.B. Spalding, E.A. Brun, E. Hahne, T. Mizushina, E.R.G. Eckert, T.F. Irvine, N. Afgan, Z. Zaric, and myself. Afgan and Zaric reported that the Boris Kidric Institute of Nuclear Studies in Belgrade planned to hold a summer school in September 1968 at Herceg-Novi on the Adriatic and hoped to do this every summer. It was unanimously agreed that the concept had considerable merit and should be pursued on the occasion of the Herceg-Novi conference.

For the next few months, Afgan and Zaric prepared the necessary documents to formalize the establishment of a new international center with the secretariat to be located in Belgrade. A number of foreign visitors were invited to the summer school and participated in the constitutive meeting which was held on September 16, 1968. Professor D. Velickovic a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences, chaired the meeting which was attended by the following individuals:

The following decisions were taken:

1. The international activity which had been started as a Summer School on Heat and Mass Transfer should be continued on an annual basis.
2. The activity should be broadened to cover other modes of international cooperation in the field of heat and mass transfer.
3. The official name of the new organization shall be the International Centre for Heat and Mass Transfer (ICHMT).
4. The Centre should promote international cooperation in heat and mass transfer by organizing summer schools and seminars on selected topics.

It was decided that the organizational structure of ICHMT should include a Scientific Council composed of outstanding scientists from many countries and an Organization Committee. Members of the Scientific Council, acting through the President of the Council, shall give guidance and advise to the Organization Committee. In turn the Organization Committee, acting through its Chairman, shall initiate and control the activities of the Centre.

In order to establish the Centre, the following individuals were elected to the Scientific Council:

On the next day, September 7, 1968, Professor Brun convened the initial meeting of the Scientific Council. With few exceptions, all of the above-named participants in the Constitutive Meeting attended this meeting which was devoted to a discussion of possible topics for future conferences. On the same day, Professor Afgan chaired a meeting of the Organization Committee attended by A.I. Leontiev, D.B. Spalding, Z. Zaric and myself. The major business was the selection of "Heat and Mass Transfer in Separated Flows" as the topic for the 1969 conference with Zaric as conference chairman and myself as vice-chairman.

A follow-up meeting was held in Paris on December 7, 1968 under the sponsorship of Professor Brun. On this occasion, the following new members were elected to the Scientific Council: K.O. Beatty (USA), U. Grigull (FRG), W.B. Hall (UK), T.W. Hoffinan (Canada), P.M. Lacey (UK), T. Mizushina (Japan), Y. Mori (Japan), N. Nishiwaki (Japan), J.T. Rogers (Canada), O.A. Saunders (UK), K. Stephan (FRG),and M. Veron (France). The Organization Committee was also expanded to include A. Fortier (France), T.F. Irvine (USA) and L. Napolitano (Italy).

Thus was bom the International Centre for Heat and Mass Transfer some three decades ago. The fact that the Centre continues to play a vital role in fostering research and development gives evidence of the far-sightedness of the founding fathers.