RAYMOND VISKANTA (1931-2021)

BY JOHN R. HOWELL AND JAYATHI MURTHY
with Facts and Inspiration from Former Students
and Colleagues

RAYMOND VISKANTA was the W.F.M. Goss Professor of Engineering at Purdue University. He died on Dec. 27, 2021.

He was an incredible colleague, mentor, and friend. Much of this piece draws from a similar tribute by 11 of Ray’s graduate students and colleagues, published in the May 2023 issue of the ASME Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer.¹

Ray was born in Marijampole, Lithuania, on July 16, 1931, to Vincas and Genovaite Viskanta. With World War II intensifying, the family escaped to Germany in 1944. A year later, after the war ended, they were moved into displaced persons camps in West Germany. In 1949, the family immigrated to the United States, first working on farms in Michigan before settling in Chicago in 1950. There, Ray worked in a factory by day and attended high school in the evening, earning his diploma in 1951.

He began taking night courses at a junior college before enrolling full-time at the University of Illinois at Navy Pier. After transferring to the main campus, he earned a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering with high honors in 1955. In 1956 he completed a Master of Science in mechanical engineering at Purdue University, focusing on heat transfer, and then began working as an associate mechanical engineer at Argonne National Laboratory. While at Argonne, Ray completed his doctoral research in absentia and earned his Ph.D. from Purdue in 1960. He remained at Argonne until 1962, when he joined Purdue as an associate professor. Just four years later, he was promoted to full professor. Throughout his career, he held numerous visiting and guest professorships, including appointments at the University of California, Berkeley, the Technical University of Munich, the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and the University of Karlsruhe. In 1986, he was named Purdue’s W.F.M. Goss Distinguished Professor.

Over the course of his career, Ray studied a wide range of topics in convection and radiation heat transfer, starting with the development of radiation theory in participating media, and accounting for interactions with other significant heat transfer modes. His many contributions in convection addressed phenomena — at the time poorly understood — as varied as double-diffusive transport and jet impingement boiling. His research on melting and solidification in both pure materials and metallic alloys, including solid-liquid phase change in the presence of convection in the liquid phase, has been described as seminal. In addition to advancing the fundamental understanding of these and other heat transfer phenomena, he also contributed to practical applications in combustion and fire safety, materials processing, manufacturing, and both conventional and emerging energy generation and storage technologies.

He received recognition throughout his career not only for the exceptional quality and productivity of his work, but also for its expansive breadth. Most of his research was conducted jointly with students. He advised 64 doctoral students, 48 master’s students, and 39 postgraduate researchers. He published more than 540 publications in over 50 journals across the U.S., Europe, and Japan, and delivered over 200 keynote papers and invited lectures at conferences, universities, and research institutions around the world. He was listed as an ISI Highly Cited Author in Engineering by the ISI Web of Knowledge, Thomson Scientific Company. Several awards have been named in his honor, including the Viskanta Fellowship Lecture at Purdue and the Raymond Viskanta Award from Elsevier.

Ray made extensive contributions to the heat transfer community. He organized numerous heat transfer conferences and served in technical editorial or advisory roles for many leading journals. These included Applied Mechanics Reviews, Experimental Heat Transfer, International Communications in Heat and Mass Transfer, International Journal of Heat and Fluid Flow, International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, ASME Journal of Heat Transfer, Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Heat Transfer, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Journal of Thermophysics and Heat Transfer, Numerical Heat Transfer, and the Annual Review of Numerical Fluid Mechanics and Heat Transfer.

His professional accomplishments earned a wide range of honors, including the Heat Transfer Memorial Award from ASME in 1976; the Thermophysics Award from AIAA in 1979; the Senior Research Award from the American Society for Engineering Education in 1984; the ASME/American Institute of Chemical Engineers Max Jakob Memorial Award in 1986; the ASME Heat Transfer Best Paper Award in 1986; the ASME Melville Medal in 1988; the Nusselt-Reynolds Prize of the Assembly of World Conferences on Experimental Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics in 1991; and the Thermal Engineering Award for International Activity from the Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1994.

Ray was named a fellow of ASME in 1976, a fellow of AIAA in 1988, and a Distinguished Engineering Alumnus of the University of Illinois in 1984. In 1983, he received a fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. In 2007, he was awarded the Stodola Medal by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Most recently, in May 2023, Ray was honored by his peers with a special issue of the ASME Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer dedicated to his work.

In addition to these recognitions, Ray received numerous national and international accolades. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1987. He became a foreign member of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences in 1990 and joined the National Academy of Engineering Sciences of the Russian Federation as a foreign member in 1995. He was awarded honorary doctorates of engineering from the Technical University of Munich in 1994 and from Purdue in 2007.

He cared deeply about his graduate students, who knew him as “RV.” As a mentor, he maintained high standards and offered painstakingly detailed feedback on his students’ work. He taught them how to break down complex problems into simpler sub-problems that could be solved more easily. One of his favorite sayings was “Don’t bite more than you can chew.” His graduate students also remember how quickly he returned feedback. A draft manuscript given to him in the afternoon would often come back the next morning marked with meticulous edits and extensive comments. In this way, Ray taught his students not only how to write clearly and effectively, but also how to become careful researchers and thoughtful mentors. Ray’s laboratory welcomed an enormous mix of students from around the world. He and his wife, Barbara, shared a love of travel and a passion for discovering new cultures. Many students came to Purdue specifically to work with him and felt honored to be a part of an elite and supportive academic community.

Ray and Barbara effectively became surrogate parents to many of his graduate students, especially international students. He made it a point to foster lasting connections between generations of students, giving them a sense of belonging and support, and providing strong professional networks as they advanced in their careers. It was not unusual for former students to maintain close relationships with the Viskantas — and with their children and grandchildren — many decades after graduation.

That same spirit of kindness and camaraderie extended to Ray’s faculty colleagues in the School of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue. He frequently collaborated with faculty on both fundamental and applied heat transfer research. He was a mentor to junior colleagues and a conscientious contributor to the life of the school. Faculty members have remarked on the full schedule he maintained even after retirement, co-advising graduate students, contributing to professional societies, and traveling internationally to lecture and collaborate. Ray and Barbara were kind and generous hosts to generations of Purdue faculty, often hosting departmental functions at their beautiful home and garden, which they designed and maintained themselves.

Ray is survived by his beloved wife of 66 years, Birute, “Barbara”; his daughter, Renata Viskanta Sutter, and her husband Harry Sutter; his son, Vitas Viskanta, and his wife, Julia, and their children, Sara and Lukas; and his son, Tadas Viskanta, and his twins, Audra and Jonas. He is greatly missed.

__________________
¹Much of this information was retrieved from Bianchi, MWA, Bergman TL, Dhi VK, Faghri A., Fedorov AG, Mengüç MP, Mohamad A, Pilon L, Ruan X., Song T-H, Webb BW, Xu X. 2023. “In memoriam: Raymond Viskanta,” ASME Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 145(5):050101. We also thank Ray’s students for sharing their memories of him, which form a meaningful part of this tribute.