Research Specialty Area: Thermal & Fluid Science

Healthy Buildings Research Laboratory (HBRL)

Room: EB 575
Faculty Owner: Elliott Gall
Contact: [email protected] 

The Healthy Buildings Research Laboratory (HBRL) conducts research to improve the sustainability of built environments. Core areas focus on human-building interactions, including the intersection of indoor and urban environmental quality, human exposure to air pollution, of building energy use.

The HBRL houses extensive facilities for both fundamental research and applied measurements. This includes equipment for both laboratory and field use under these five fundamental categories:

-    Indoor environmental quality measurement and data logging capabilities;
-    Computational resources for building energy, internal/external CFD and urban climate modeling;
-    Energy performance measurements & logging for equipment and buildings; and
-    Fundamental thermal property (conductivity, emissivity, reflectivity, and transmissivity) characterization of building materials.
-    Infrared instruments for envelope thermal performance and moisture assessments

Microscale Lab

Room: EB 580
Faculty Owner: Derek Tretheway
Contact: [email protected]

Research in the Microscale Laboratory focuses on fundamental fluid  mechanics at the microscale, novel materials for microfluidic devices, optical and fluid manipulation of cells, and non-Newtonian fluid mechanics.

Research projects have included velocity measurements at the moving contact line with unprecedented resolution, the development of microfluidic channels with porous silk structures, the study of single cells optically trapped in microfluidic flows, the passive separation of fluids and particles from the increased effects of surfaceforces at the microscale, and rheological studies of polymer solutions.

Wind Energy & Turbulence Lab

Wind Energy Lab
Room: EB 115
Turbulence Lab
Room: EB 520
Faculty Owner: Raul Cal
Contact: [email protected] 

At Portland State University, the Wind Energy and Turbulence Lab targets to answer questions dealing with fluids in the turbulent regime. A large portion of the efforts has been placed in understanding flows pertaining to wind energy, volcanic eruptions and forests to name a few. 

Elucidating mechanisms in the interactions between the flow and these systems allows for the possibility of answering relevant questions as well as understanding these systems as a whole. Flow are scaled and studied in a wind tunnel setting via the use of laser-based techniques. 

Sustainable Systems Lab

Room: EB 470
Faculty Owner: Ilke Celik
Contact: [email protected] 

Dr. Celik's research interests are developing sustainability concepts for infrastructure systems and consist of computational and experimental works. More recently, she has focused on developing sustainable energy storage systems integrated with emerging redox battery systems and assessing their sustainability trade-offs. Also, Celik has been generating ideas on incorporating transparent PV technologies with urban agricultural systems to promote nature-inspired solar panels to decentralize city energy production and food supply. 

Urban Environment Lab

Room: EB 585
Faculty Owner: Luke Zhu
Contact: [email protected]

Dr. Zhu is deeply engrossed in the field of turbulence, leveraging Computational Fluid Dynamics as his main investigative tool. His research direction encompass: heat transfer and air pollutant dispersion in urban environments,  bio-inspired strategies for turbulent drag reduction, and the dynamics of large wind farms.