Clarkson University Distinguished Professor Goodarz Ahmadi Appointed Dean of the Coulter School of Engineering

Distinguished University Professor Goodarz Ahmadi

Clarkson University Distinguished Professor Goodarz Ahmadi has been appointed Dean of the Coulter School of Engineering. He joined the faculty of Clarkson in 1982. Prior to his tenure at Clarkson, he was Dean of Engineering at Shiraz University in Iran. Professor Ahmadi (former Vice Provost for Research at Clarkson) is the co-director of Clarkson's Center for Air Resources Engineering and Science and a board member of the Center for Advanced Materials Processing. In addition, he has served the University in numerous capacities, including interim Dean of Engineering, Associate Dean of Engineering for Research and Graduate Studies and Chair of the Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering. In 2001, Ahmadi was the first professor to be awarded the title of "Clarkson Distinguished Professor," which recognizes tenured professors whose accomplishments well exceed the requirements for promotion to the rank of full professor. More recently, Ahmadi was honored with the Robert R. Hill '48 Professorship in Mechanical Engineering. The professorship was established through a $1 million endowment created from a generous gift from Robert and Mildred Hill and matching funds.

Professor Ahmadi is internationally known for his numerous engineering and scientific research contributions and has authored several books and over 400 technical publications in archival journals. Also he has made more than 500 presentations at national and international technical meetings and has given more than 100 invited talks and short courses at other institutions.

His research interests include multiphase and granular flows, particle and fiber adhesion and removal, aerosols, micro-contamination control, turbulence modeling, stability of fluid motions, continuum mechanics, and nonlinear random vibrations. His work has been supported by the Department of Energy (DOE), EPA, the National Science Foundation, NASA, Corning, IBM, Xerox, Dura and the New York State Foundation for Science, Technology and Innovation in excess of $5 million over the last 12 years. Ahmadi is currently working on EPA, DOE and NSF-funded projects. He is developing a new technique for modeling air flows and particulate pollutant transport deposition and removal in indoor and outdoor air, for gas-liquid flows in porous media and in rock fractures with application to carbon dioxide sequestration, for three-phase slurry reactors with application to synthetic fuel generation from coal, for modeling of the chemical-mechanical polishing process, and for hot-gas filtration.

Professor Vladimir Privman Models Self-Healing Materials and Burst Nucleation in Solution

Figure 1: The solid curves illustrate the fraction of the undamaged material, u(t), with (upper curve) and without (lower curve), as functions of time. The dashed curves illustrate the behavior of the respective mean-field conductance, G(t), with the conductance decreasing slower with self-healing present, eventually reaching zero at the percolation transition at u = 1/2.

Professor Vladimir Privman and his group are carrying out research in materials modeling that involves self-healing materials. Specifically, with graduate student A. Demenstov, Professor Privman explored the conductance of self-healing materials as a measure of the material integrity in the regime of the onset of the initial fatigue. Continuum effective-field modeling and lattice numerical simulations were recently published in the prestigious European journal Physica. These results illustrated the general features of the self-healing process. The onset of the material fatigue is delayed, by developing a plateau-like time-dependence of a measure of the material's integrity. It was demonstrated that in this low-damage regime, the changes in the conductance and similar transport/response properties of the material can be used as measures of the material quality and degradation.

For projects involving nanoparticles and colloid synthesis, Professor Privman's work with postdoctoral associate Dr. D. T. Robb, has resulted in the first quantitative modeling approach to burst nucleation in solution, in which a period of apparent chemical inactivity is followed by a sudden and explosive growth of nucleated particles from a solute species. The developed model has recently been accepted for publication in the American Chemical Society journal Langmuir. It uses the assumptions of instantaneous rethermalization below the critical cluster size, and irreversible diffusive growth above the critical size. This research is the first time that LaMer's classical explanation of burst nucleation has been formulated in a manner that allows quantitative calculations. The behavior of the model at large times was derived, and an effective numerical scheme was developed to integrate the equations of the model.