MechSE professors Brian Thomas and Surya Pratap Vanka, along with their student Hyunjin Yang, were selected for the 2018 Robert T. Knapp Award from ASME for their paper, “Hybrid Eulerian Discrete Phase Model of Turbulent Bubbly Flow.”
The award was presented by the Fluids Engineering Division of ASME at the 2018 5th Joint US-European Fluids Engineering Summer Conference in Montreal, Canada, in July.
Thomas is a Research Professor and the C.J. Gauthier Professor Emeritus in MechSE. His work is in the field of metals processing and focuses on the computational modeling of continuous casting of steel and related processes. He is the director of the Continuous Casting Consortium (CCC), a cooperative research effort to develop accurate computational models of the continuous casting process and to apply them to solve practical problems of interest to the steel industry.
Vanka is a Research Professor and Professor Emeritus in MechSE. His research focuses on several areas of computational fluid dynamics, including transport processes in chemical vapor deposition reactors, large eddy simulations in continuous casting of steel, microscale mixing, particle transport in turbulent flows, and heat transfer in wavy passages.
Yang is a PhD student advised by Thomas, and conducts research in the Metals Processing Simulation Laboratory. He was first author on the paper.