Sepehr Foroushani

Thermal balance between the body and the environment is a precondition of thermal comfort. This balance depends on the bodily heat generation due to metabolism and heat dissipation to the ambient. Various thermoregulatory mechanisms are in place to adjust the latter in response to changes in the former and maintain the balance. Otherwise, thermal d...

Winner of DGKK Best Poster Award

Slides available upon request

Slides available upon request.

Slides available upon request.

Presentation slides available on request.

Presentation slides available on request.

Crystalline materials are indispensable to modern life. The production of crystals usually entails high temperatures, making radiation the dominant mode of heat transfer. Knowing the emissivity of the various surfaces in a crystal growth furnace is essential for numerical simulations which are widely used to better understand the complex, multiphys...

Slides available upon request

Presentation slides available on request.

Full slides available upon request

Presentation slides available on request

A versatile meteorological index for predicting heat stress in dairy cattle remains elusive. Despite numerous attempts at developing such indices and widespread use of some, there is growing skepticism about the accuracy and adequacy of the existing indices as well as the general statistical approach used to develop them. At the same time, precisio...

Preventing and alleviating heat stress remain an enormous challenge in dairy farming. Although enhanced air distribution techniques have been developed and deployed in many barns, ventilation alone is no longer sufficient even in regions with historically mild climates. There is an increasing need for cooling of the intake fresh air. Evaporative co...

Content NIR Sensors Challenges and potential of NIR sensors to simplify the generation of nitrogen flow balances – Digital mapping of nitrogen cycles ..... 1 On Farm Validation of different NIR Sensors for Manure Sensing ..... 9 Combine Harvester Analysis of Combine Harvester Threshing Systems Across Different Climate Regions ..... 17 An interactiv...

Content NIR Sensors Challenges and potential of NIR sensors to simplify the generation of nitrogen flow balances – Digital mapping of nitrogen cycles ..... 1 On Farm Validation of different NIR Sensors for Manure Sensing ..... 9 Combine Harvester Analysis of Combine Harvester Threshing Systems Across Different Climate Regions ..... 17 An interactiv...

Controlling air leakage through the building envelope remains a challenge, especially in light of the imperative to transition to a net-zero energy building sector and the increasing importance of indoor air quality during extreme weather events such as wildfires. The British Columbia Energy Step Code is a performance-based compliance option in the...

For decarbonization of the building sector to happen at scale, net-zero energy levels of operational efficiency must be achieved. A global consensus is emerging around the Passive House energy performance level (15 kWh/m²/a thermal energy demand) as “net-zero energy ready”. Given the imperative to rapidly transform buildings and shortcomings of the...

As performance-based building energy codes proliferate, building energy simulation (BES) becomes an essential tool to verify and document code compliance. Accordingly, uncertainty in BES results becomes increasingly important to various stakeholders, including local governments. The British Columbia Energy Step Code (ESC) is one of the latest perfo...

There has been a resurgence of interest in district energy networks due to the cost, energy and emission reductions they can deliver. The prohibitively large computational cost of estimating thermal energy demand based on district- and urban-scale energy simulations is a major barrier to the wide-scale use of modeling in design and operation of dis...

Humidity is one of the climate parameters in greenhouse food production. Maintaining the humidity levels within the optimal growth range enhances yield. Moreover, excessively high relative humidity levels lead to diseases and deterioration of the crops. This paper presents a state-of-the-art review of the various dehumidification technologies avail...

Laminar free convection in a vertical channel with isothermal walls is a classical heat transfer problem. In general, the channel walls may be at different temperatures, leading to a difference in the rate of heat transfer at the walls. Although numerical and experimental results are often presented in terms of average wall Nusselt numbers, separat...

This paper examines engineering students’ misconceptions of thermodynamics. A summary of the pedagogical theories of misconceptions is presented and the cognitive roots of misconceptions are briefly reviewed. Concept tests are discussed as one of the most effective tools for diagnosing misconceptions, followed by a summary of the available thermody...

Heat recovery ventilators (HRVs), widely used in residential buildings, are promising alternatives to the incumbent natural ventilation method for dehumidification of greenhouses. Using HRVs, a portion of the thermal energy, discharged to the outdoor through ventilation, is recovered and utilized to heat the fresh air supply. However, the existing...

Data-driven models that use the system response to certain initial/boundary conditions to predict the system characteristics are a promising approach to the development of computationally efficient urban energy models. Such models are required for the design and optimization of urban energy systems including district energy networks (DENs) as well...

This paper examines the three-temperature problem of convection at the indoor side of a complex fenestration system (CFS) based on recent theoretical developments, namely the extended Newton formulation and the dQdT technique. CFD solutions were obtained for natural convection at the indoor side of various CFS configurations. The dQdT technique was...

Many convection problems entail more than two isothermal boundaries. In previous work, a resistor-network model was proposed for this class, multi-temperature convection problems. A technique dubbed dQdT was also developed to obtain the paired convective resistances that characterize the thermal network of a multi-temperature convection problem. In...

The three-temperature problem of turbulent free convection of air in a vertical channel with isothermal walls is studied. An extension of the Newton law of cooling is used to formulate the problem in terms of three temperature differences, i.e. without resorting to the use of some effective temperature difference. The dQdT technique was applied num...

In recent work, the resistor-network formulation of forced-convection problems and a technique (dQdT) for evaluating the paired convective resistances that characterize the network were presented. This technique entails solutions of the energy equation with perturbed boundary conditions. In the present paper, the dQdT technique is extended to free...

Many convection heat transfer problems involve more than two isothermal heat sources/sinks. A network of multiple convective resistors connecting temperature nodes representing the isothermal sources (walls, inlet flows, etc.) can be used to represent this class of problem. However, the convective resistances that characterize this network cannot g...

A numerical study is conducted of laminar free convection from a vertical window glazing adjacent to an insect screen which is modeled as a layer of porous medium. The numerical results are validated against optical temperature field visualization and local heat flux measurements. The numerical model is also shown to agree well with established cor...

Forced-convective heat transfer from the walls of an asymmetrically heated channel to the fluid passing through in a laminar, hydrodynamically developed flow is known as the asymmetric Graetz problem. Several analytical and numerical solutions for this problem have been published, and many variations and extensions have been investigated. Recently,...

Wind-Driven Rain (WDR) is known to be a major source of moisture loads on building envelopes and is responsible for numerous cases of building envelope failure. Roof overhangs are traditionally used and have been shown to be effective in reducing the exposure of buildings to WDR in certain climates. However, their effects on WDR wetting of facades...

The distribution of wind-driven rain loads on building facades is of high importance in evaluating the hygrothermal performance and durability of building envelopes. Wind-driven rain is known to be a major source of moisture loads on building facades and is responsible for numerous cases of facade failure. One of the classical solutions for prevent...