Biography of Steven Beale

steven.beale@nrc.ca

CAREER SUMMARY 1983 - present time. NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL OF CANADA

Steven Beale joined NRC's Division of Energy in 1983, where he was involved in procuring and managing research and development contracts in the renewable energy sector. He also conducted research in residential applications of solar domestic hot water, managed the NRC solar domestic hot water test facility in Ottawa, and built experiments at the National Solar Test Facility located in Toronto.

In 1985, Steven joined the Thermal Technology Program (formerly the Low Temperature Laboratory) in the Division of Mechanical Engineering, where he conducted basic and applied research in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and numerical heat transfer relating to heat exchanger design. He was project leader of the NRC/IBM joint research agreement in CFD. During this time he also spent two periods of professional development leave at Imperial College (UK) in 1986 and 1991.

Steven is presently in the Institute for Chemical Process and Environmental Technology and is involved in computer modelling of several engineering applications involving chemical industries, and also processes with environmental implications and concerns. Recent research has been concerned with transport phenomena in fuel cells, including both proton exchange membrane and solid oxide fuel cells and stacks; Thermal, electrical, and mechanical design of chemical sensors; Granular multi-phase flow in industrial chemical-process equipment; Basic research in grid generation and scientific visualization, including the use of virtual reality (VR) walls and immersion techniques.

Steven's group includes professionals, such as computer scientists, visiting postdoctoral fellows, and students. Current hardware platforms include several Silicon Graphics workstations, and an 80 node beowulf cluster running LINUX.

PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES

From 1992-1994, Steven was Executive Director of the CFD Society of Canada. He also co-founded and chaired the inter-institute NRC-CFD group. Steven is a registered professional engineer in Ontario. He is a Fellow of the IMechE and a member of ASME. where he serves on the Executive Committee of the Process Industries Division. Steven Beale is an adjunct Professor at the Department Mechanical and Materials Engineering at Queen’s University where he co-supervises two graduate students.

QUALIFICATIONS

Ph.D. and Diploma of Imperial College in Computational Fluid Dynamics (Chemical Engineering), University of London, 1993. Thesis title: Fluid Flow and Heat Transfer in Tube Banks. Supervisor: Prof. D.Brian Spalding. Click here for a clip of vortex shedding in tube banks

MS in Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Berkeley,

BEng in Mechanical Engineering, McGill University