Dr. Omri Ram
Dr. Omri Ram’s Transient Flow Laboratory in the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the Technion will study industrial and natural processes that are either limited by or rely on highly transient phenomena in fluid mechanics that involve high accelerations, rapid phase changes, or interfacial phenomena. The lab will implement recent technological advances in experimental techniques and develop new methodologies to enhance the fundamental understanding of such flow phenomena whose complexity and vast time and spatial scales currently limit the ability to model and predict them. The topics studied in Dr. Ram’s lab have numerous and far-reaching applications to energy, fluids, and environmental systems.
Dr. Ram completed his bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Ben-Gurion University. He served as an undergraduate research assistant in BGU’s Shock Tube Laboratory, where he worked on simulating small-scale explosions to study blast mitigation strategies and improve safety assessments.
As a graduate student, Dr. Ram studied the interaction of shock waves with porous media. He developed a macroscopic analysis approach rather than the microscopic one commonly used by others, enabling him to discover universal shock wave mitigation characteristics common to various porous materials. During his graduate studies, Dr. Ram participated in various studies, including shock-structure interaction, shock wave reflection phenomena, and blast-induced traumatic brain injuries.
Before joining the Technion, Dr. Ram was a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University, where he studied high-speed transient phenomena in fluid mechanics, particularly the origins of cavitation in fast flows (rapid formation of vapor cavities in liquids due to pressure decrease). This causes noise, vibrations, efficiency loss, and structural damage in many engineering applications. He also studied the transient separation mechanism of oil and water that occurs when oil is released from an underwater oil spill and rises to the surface, potentially improving our fundamental understanding of the evolution of oil spills that devastate marine wildlife.
