Babak Shotorban, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor
Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering

Education

Biography

Dr. Babak Shotorban has been an Assistant Professor in UAHuntsville since 2008. He was a Software Development Engineer in ESI-Group from 2007 to 2008, and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for Simulation of Advanced Rockets in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 2005 to 2007 prior to joining UAHuntsville. He has authored or co-authored a book chapter and over 30 journal and conference articles. Dr. Shotorban has been a PI or Co-PI on a number of projects supported by the NSF, USDA and BP. His current research projects are concerned with the high-order two-fluid methods for particle-laden flows, fire initiation and propagation in sparse vegetation, effects of heating mechanisms and moisture content on ignition of live fuels, stochastic charging and dynamics of dust particles in plasmas, and transport of particulates in oil-spill events. Dr. Shotorban is a senior member of AIAA and a member of APS and ASME.

Research Expertise

• Turbulent particle/droplet-laden flows
• Reacting flows in fires
• Dusty plasmas
• Stochastic/probabilistic modeling
• Computational fluid dynamics
• High performance computing

Honors & Awards

• Junior Faculty Distinguished Research Award, The University of Alabama in Huntsville, 2010 and 2011
• Research Mini-Grant Award, The University of Alabama in Huntsville, 2008 and 2009
• Provost’s Award for Graduate Research, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2004
• University Graduate Fellowship, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2003

Recent Publications

Dahale, A., Ferguson, S., Shotorban, B., and Mahalingam, S., ``Effects of Distribution of Bulk Density and Moisture Content on Shrub Fires,'' International Journal of Wildland Fire, in press.

Ferguson, S., Dahale, A., Shotorban, B., Mahalingam, S., and Weise, D. R., ``The Role of Moisture on Combustion of Pyrolysis Gases in Wildland Fires,'' Combustion Science and Technology, in press.

Shotorban, B., ``Stochastic Fluctuations of Dust Particle Charge in RF Discharges,'' Physics of Plasmas, 19, 053702, 2012.

Horn, C., Davoudabadi, M., and Shotorban, B., ``Effects of Radiofrequency on Dust Particle Dynamics in a Plasma Reactor,'' Journal of Applied Physics, 110, 113305, 2011.

Shotorban, B., ``Nonstationary Stochastic Charge Fluctuations of a Dust Particle in Plasmas,'' Physical Review E, 83, 066403, 2011.

Dunn, M.C., Shotorban, B., and Frendi, A., ``Uncertainty Quantification of Turbulence Model Coefficients via Latin Hypercube Sampling Method,'' Journal of Fluids Engineering- Transactions of The ASME, 133, 041402, 2011.

Shotorban, B., ``Preliminary Assessment of Two-fluid Model for Direct Numerical Simulation of Particle-laden Flows,'' AIAA Journal, 49, 438-443, 2011.

Shotorban, B., ``Dynamic Least-squares Kernel Density Modeling of Fokker-Planck Equations with Application to Neural Population,'' Physical Review E, 81, 046706, 2010.

Zhang, K.K.Q., Shotorban, B., Minkowycz, W.J., and Mashayek, F., ``A Comprehensive Approach for Simulation of Capillary Jet Breakup,'' International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, 53, 3057-3066, 2010.

Shotorban, B., and Balachandar, S., ``A Two-fluid Approach for Direct Numerical Simulation of Particle-laden Turbulent Flows at Small Stokes Numbers,'' Physical Review E, 79, 056703, 2009.

Sengupta, K., Shotorban, B., Jacobs, G.B., and Mashayek, F., ``Spectral-based Simulations of Particle-laden Turbulent Flows,'' International Journal of Multiphase Flow, 35, 811-826, 2009.