Mohamed A. Samaha - Featured Faculty 2019

In addition, his research spans methods of harvesting renewable energy including wind turbines and solar panels. Mohamed also worked in advancing relatively low-cost micro/ nanofabrication of slippery superhydrophobic and omniphobic surfaces for drag-reduction purposes. He also contributed to other areas such as turbulence modeling of the flow through hydraulic capsule pipelines.

Mohamed is collaborating with Professor Ghalib Y. Kahwaji and a team at RIT-Dubai on research projects funded from the U.A.E government and industry. The projects include: (1) passive natural convection enhancement around a horizontal cylinder with applications in industrial systems including heat exchangers, boilers and electronics cooling systems; (2) development of energy storage systems using phase-change materials; (3) characterization of the accumulated dust layer on solar panels; and (4) design optimization of high capacity ground-coupled heat exchanger. Dr. Samaha is recently collaborating with a research group from the main campus at Rochester, NY, and co-advising a Ph.D. student, Nastaran Naghshineh, with her main advisor, Professor Steven Weinstein. They are advancing a theoretical model to simulate the configuration of a thin viscous flow around a rotating cylinder to form a stable roller coating. Meanwhile, Mohamed is collaborating with Professor Kahwaji and a team at Korea Maritime & Ocean University, Busan, South Korea headed by Professor Young-Ho Lee to design a new profile for wind lens aiming to increase the wind turbine efficiency.

Prior to joining RIT-Dubai, Dr. Samaha was a postdoctoral research associate for two years at Princeton University, NJ, working on the grant of Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI), Office of Naval Research (ONR) jointly with other groups from Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Michigan, Minnesota, and others. They were advancing a new slippery omniphobic coating for drag reduction purposes. During his doctoral thesis at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), VA, he was working in the area of experimental and computational characterization of superhydrophobic slippery surfaces fabricated using AC-electrospinning and random particle deposition, funded from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). During his master thesis at Alexandria University, Egypt, he has advanced CFD turbulence models to simulate hydraulic capsule pipeline flow.

So far, Mohamed has published 18 journal articles, two more in preparation and 24 conference papers and abstracts. His articles have been published in prestigious journals including Physics of Fluids, Langmuir, Journal of Colloid and Interface Science, Review of Scientific Instruments, Measurement Science and Technology, the ASME Journal of Fluids Engineering, the AIAA Journal of Thermophysics and Heat Transfer and others. Additionally, he is an official reviewer in several journals. Mohamed is a member of the American Physical Society (APS) and the advisor of the ASHRAE Student chapter at RIT-Dubai.

Mohamed A. Samaha
Associate Professor
RIT-Dubai, U.A.E.