Shah Haque, a student at the Process Engineering and Light Metals Centre (PELM) at CQU Gladstone has won the Best Student Paper Award in the Fluid Mechanics category at The 2006 WSEAS (World Scientific and Engineering Academy and Society) International Conference on Fluid Mechanics held in Miami, Florida, USA, last month (January 18-20).

The Master of Engineering student presented a paper on Numerical Simulation of Turbulent Flow inside the Electrostatic Precipitator (ESP) of a Power Plant.

The paper was co-authored by his supervisors Dr Mohammad Rasul (CQU), Dr Alex Deev (CQU), Assoc Prof Masud Khan (CQU) and Mr Jiping Zhou (Stanwell Corporation Ltd).

In this study, the flue gas flow through the ESP at a local power station was modelled numerically using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code Fluent to give insight to the flow behavior inside the ESP.

The flow simulation was performed using the Reynolds Stress Model (RSM). The prediction of the flow behaviour was compared with on-site data supplied by the power plant.

The conference was a peer-reviewed conference and the paper was reviewed by 2 independent reviewers before it was approved for the publication.

Mr Haque achieved the award due to the originality and scientific impact of the paper and his good presentation skills at the conference.

He would like to thank his supervisors for their guidance and help with the paper and Jiping Zhou from Stanwell Corporation Limited for providing on-site data.