Department of
MECHANICAL ENGINEERING

Faculty & Staff

Dr. John Chai Professor & Chairman Office: Ruwais Building, Room 3007 Phone: +971 2 607 5493 Fax: +971 2 607 5200 Email: jchai@pi.ac.ae

• Ph.D. University of Minnesota, 1994

John C. Chai joined the Petroleum Institute (PI) as professor and Chairman of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He received his B.S. (with First-Class Honors) in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Windsor, Canada and his M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In 1994 he graduated from the University of Minnesota with a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering. Prior to joining the PI, he was a Principal Engineer at Amoeba Technologies Inc., a start-up CFD company. He also spent 12 years in academia at the Tennessee Technological University, USA and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research interests include development of numerical methods and models for fluid flow and heat transfer related transport phenomena. He has supervised 3 completed M.S. theses, 7 completed Ph.D. dissertations and 2 post-docs. He has published over 60 journal articles and contributed a chapter to the second edition of the Handbook of Numerical Heat Transfer. He is an Editorial Board member of Computational Thermal Sciences and an Elected Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

HONORS AND AWARDS

• Fellow ASME, 2006
• University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Alumni Association’s Graduate of the Last Decade (GOLD) Award, 1999

PROFESIONAL SERVICE

• Editorial Board member, Computational Thermal Sciences
• Member, ASME K6 committee

EXPERTISE

• Computational Transport Phenomena
• Numerical Methods for Radiation Heat Transfer
• Numerical Methods for Multiphase Flows

REPRESENTATIVE PUBLICATIONS

• Chai, J. C., Lee, H. S., and Patankar, S. V., 1994, “Finite-Volume Method for Radiation Heat Transfer,” AIAA Journal of Thermophysics and Heat Transfer, Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 419-425.
• Toh, K. C., Chen, X. Y., and Chai, J. C., 2002, “Numerical Computation of Fluid Flow and Heat Transfer in Microchannels,” International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, Vol. 45, pp. 5133-5141.
• Chai, J. C., 2003, “One-Dimensional Transient Radiation Heat Transfer Modeling using a Finite-Volume Method,” Numerical Heat Transfer, Part B, Vol. 44, pp. 187-208.
• Chai, J. C., 2004, “Transient Radiative Transfer in Irregular Two-Dimensional Geometries,” Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer, Vol. 84, pp. 281-294.
• Rath, P., Chai, J. C., Zheng, H., Lam, Y. C. and Murukeshan, V. M., 2005, “A Fixed-Grid Approach for Diffusion- and Reaction-Controlled Wet Chemical Etching,” International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, Vol. 48, pp. 2140 – 2149.
• Chai, J. C., and Patankar, S. V., 2006, “Discrete Ordinates and Finite-Volume Methods for Radiative Heat Transfer,” Handbook of Numerical Heat Transfer, Eds.; Minkowycz, W. J., Sparrow, E. M., and Murthy, J. Y., 2nd edition, Wiley, Chapter 9.
• Yap, Y. F., Chai, J. C., Wong, T. N., Toh, K. C., and Zhang, H. Y., 2006, “A Global Mass Correction Scheme for the Level-Set Method,” Numerical Heat Transfer, Part B., Vol. 50, no. 5, pp. 455 – 472.
• Chai, J. C., and Yap, Y. F., 2008, “A Distance-Function-Based Cartesian (DIFCA) Grid Method for Irregular Geometries,” International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, Vol. 51, pp. 1691 – 1706.
• Leong, K. C., Li, H. Y., Jun, L. W., and Chai, J. C., 2009, “Numerical and Experimental Study of Forced Convection in Graphite Foams of Different Configurations,” Applied Thermal Engineering, Accepted for Publication.