Advanced Thermal Modeling Intern

Eaton's Corporate Sector division is currently seeking a Advanced Thermal Modeling Intern.

The hourly rate for this position is $34.62 per hour.

Please note the salary information shown above is a general guideline only. Salaries are based upon candidate skills, experience, and qualifications, as well as market and business considerations.

What you'll do:

Eaton's Research Labs (ERL) has an exciting Engineering Intern position within the Advanced Manufacturing group to support research and technology development in emerging advanced thermal management and cooling technologies. In this role, you will contribute to early-stage design evaluation and technology exploration using novel computational simulation methodologies to study thermal and fluid behavior in complex cooling geometries for power electronics applications. You will work closely with thermal, mechanical, and electrical engineers across ERL and Eaton business units to develop modeling workflows, parametric design studies, and data-driven insights that inform future technology directions. The role also includes contributing to technical documentation, internal presentations, and intellectual property generation as appropriate. This position is located in Southfield, MI.

Job Responsibilities:

This internship supports early-stage evaluation of advanced cooling geometries using computational thermal-fluid modeling within an existing in-house mesh-free, GPU-accelerated, lattice-based simulation framework. The intern will modify and apply existing code to enable geometry-driven screening of cooling concepts, including simplified representations of two-phase heat transfer effects suitable for comparative studies. The work emphasizes workflow development, geometry evaluation, parametric studies, and reduced-order modeling approaches for rapid design trade-offs, rather than detailed physics-level two phase modeling. Technical guidance, established infrastructure, and baseline models will be provided.

Qualifications:

Basic Qualifications:

• Currently enrolled in a Master's or PhD program in Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, or related field (focus on thermal/fluid sciences).
• Solid foundation in heat transfer and fluid mechanics.
• Prior experience with computational modeling of thermal/fluid systems.
• Hands-on experience using commercial CFD solvers (e.g., ANSYS Fluent, STAR-CCM+, COMSOL, Icepak).
• Proficiency in Python and/or MATLAB for scientific computing, data processing, and automation.
• Ability to read, understand, and modify existing research-grade code with guidance.
• Experience post-processing simulation data and extracting engineering-relevant metrics.
• Strong documentation and technical communication skills.

• Exposure to conjugate heat transfer (CHT) problems.
• Familiarity with numerical methods (finite volume, lattice-based methods, or reduced-order modeling concepts).
• Experience working with parametric geometry studies or design sweeps.
• Comfort working with voxelized or grid-based geometries.
• Prior research exposure to two-phase flow or phase-change heat transfer (conceptual understanding sufficient).
• Experience using version control (e.g., Git) or structured code repositories.