Research Interests

Dr. Straatman’s research is in the general area of thermofluids, and includes engineering modelling, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), and experiment and application. His research foci include: modeling the transport of heat, mass and species in porous materials; and research on rotating flows. Applications in porous media include: enhanced convective heat/mass transfer and energy storage, while applications in rotating flows include vortex tubes, energy extraction devices and cyclones.

Dr. Straatman conducts fundamental research aimed at the development of models and algorithms that extend the capability for accurate simulation of fluid and heat flow. Of particular interest has been the development of accurate discretization techniques for conjugate heat/fluid flow modeling in conjugate fluid/porous/solid domains. Robust models have been developed to deal with transitions between fluid/porous regions and porous/solid regions. These interface formulations have extended the capability of our conjugate codes to deal with high Reynolds number flows with and without turbulence, energy transfer and contact resistance.

Research on porous materials for convective enhancement includes a combination of laboratory experiments, engineering modeling and CFD. Experiments have been conducted to characterize the permeability and pore-level heat transfer of various conductive foams. Engineering models have been developed to describe the internal structure of the porous material and the hydrodynamic and thermal performance of foam devices.  Continued effort is directed at multiphase heat transfer and the application of packed beds of phase-change materials for thermal energy storage.

Recent effort has also been directed at the characterization of high-speed rotating flows, such as those seen in Ranque-Hilsch Vortex tubes (RHVT) and in Cyclones. Current work on cyclone filtration is directed at reducing the scale of conventional cyclone devices by incorporating dynamic components.