Research

The areas of interests are air-sea interactions and atmospheric flows. The fluid dynamics in the interfacial regions plays a very crucial role in regulating these flows. However, the flow dynamics in the interfacial region is not well understood as a result, the fundamental processes involved in these environmental flows are not well explored. Particularly, with the recent awareness about the global environmental issues, improved fundamental understanding of these flows become very crucial.

Air-Sea Interactions

Air-sea heat and mass exchange has a crucial impact on the earth’s climate balance. The thermal and concentration boundary layers on both sides of the air-water interface control the heat and mass transfer, respectively. The measurements within these boundary layers are very challenging, particularly in the presence of wind when the interface fluctuates due to the generation of waves. My specific interests in this research are to investigate the fundamental physical processes within the boundary layers that govern the heat and mass transfer across the air-water interface in the presence and absence of wind, and to use this knowledge to improve the parameterization of heat and mass transfer models. Some other important issues to be investigated are, shear transfer from air to water, wave generation mechanism and interaction between the airside and waterside vortices.

Atmospheric Flows

The specific interests are to investigate fundamental fluid dynamical processes within the atmospheric boundary layer with the main emphasis on the effects of buoyancy, land topography and urban structures on the flow dynamics.

The research in this area is focused on concentrated solar energy systems and solar collectors for water heating systems. In concentrated solar energy systems, the incident solar radiation is focused into an enclosure through optical devices where the concentrated solar radiation is converted into heat. The main components of a concentrated solar energy system are, (i) solar collector field which consists of an array of mirrors or reflectors that reflects and focuses solar radiation onto the solar receiver, and (ii) solar receiver that transforms solar radiation into heat. The specific interests on concentrated solar energy systems are focused on parabolic dish types of collectors (see figure below).

The work on solar collectors is focused on improving the collector design to increase its efficiency.

The specific interests in this area are

• The flow mapping in the near- and far-fields downstream of a wind turbine
• The interaction of flow fields in a wind farm
• Wind environment mapping over complex topographic terrains
• Environmental impact of wind farms

The investigations are focused on the wind-tunnel laboratory experimentation using scaled-models

Thermal storage is becoming a necessary component for building sustainability and reliability of solar thermal energy supply, due to significant waste of heat in conventional building energy systems and the intermittent nature of solar thermal energy, respectively.  Thermal storages utilizing phase-change material (PCM) as the storage medium are gaining much attention in recent years due to the advantage of exploiting the enthalpy of phase-transition to store heat. Despite its significance, the main obstacle in the practical advancement of these storage mediums is the poor understanding of the heat exchange across the solid-liquid interface. The problem becomes more challenging due to the continuous, nonlinear movement of the interface during the phase change process by the addition or removal of heat. The complexity further arises due to the geometry of the heat source/sink. Currently, our research focus is on the knowledge advancement of the fundamental heat transfer process during the melting-phase of the PCM and the influence of heat source/sink geometries. 

Ph.D. Students 

Master’s Thesis students 

Ph.D. Students (Completed)

Master’s Thesis students (Completed)