People
Principal Investigator
Dr Alimohammadi is a Lecturer in the School of Mechanical Engineering and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Trinity College Dublin, where he completed his PhD in 2015. He has held research posts at TU Braunschweig, Trinity College Dublin and Purdue University's Cooling Technologies Research Center, and an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship. His group develops thermal management innovations at device, system and facility level, several of which are moving towards pilot evaluation with industry partners. His awards include the Harvey Rosten Award for Excellence (2020) and TU Dublin's inaugural Early Career Researcher Award (2023), and in 2026 he became the first TU Dublin researcher elected to Young Academy Ireland. He is Guest Editor of a special issue of Energy on the energy and environmental impacts of cloud computing and data centres.
Profile: https://researchprofiles.tudublin.ie/en/persons/sajad-alimohammadi-2/ | ORCID 0000-0002-8507-1005
Postdoctoral researchers
Dr Robiul Hossain, Senior Research Assistant
Robiul leads the instrumentation and autonomous control of the Cyber Physical Server Benchmarking Platform and the verification, validation and testing of server cooling technologies, funded by MaREI, the Research Ireland Centre for Energy, Climate and Marine. His control framework holds server inlet temperature to within one degree, settles in under two seconds after a step change in load, and has supported demonstrated fan power reductions of 20 to 30%. He presented this work at THERMINIC 2026 in Berlin with Eoin Oude Essink, Dr Ciara Ahern and Prof. Tim Persoons. He holds a PhD from Trinity College Dublin on acoustic plate-valve resonators for low-frequency sound absorption, an MSc from the University of Bremen and a BSc in electrical and electronic engineering, and previously worked at the University of Galway on wind turbine noise, psychoacoustics and soundscape assessment. He also holds ConstructInnovate seed funding for a recycled tyre acoustic underlay project.
Profile: https://researchprofiles.tudublin.ie/en/persons/md-robiul-hossain/ | ORCID 0000-0003-4507-2916
Dr Stephen Lee, Postdoctoral Researcher
Stephen works on digital twins and machine learning for engineering and manufacturing processes through TU Dublin's ARISE programme, which pairs research with direct engagement with companies, and he leads the group's outreach to industry partners. His PhD at the University of Limerick developed real-time digital twin and machine learning methods for assessing hole quality and tool condition during robotic drilling of composite materials, published in the Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing and the International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology. He holds a BSc in aircraft maintenance and airworthiness engineering and has extensive experience in composite manufacturing, mechanical testing and industrial robotic systems.
Profile: https://researchprofiles.tudublin.ie/en/persons/stephen-kh-lee/ | ORCID 0000-0001-8300-4063
Dr Sahan Wasala, Research Fellow (Trinity College Dublin and TU Dublin)
Sahan works on the joint TU Dublin and Trinity project funded through Purdue University's Cooling Technologies Research Center, developing quiet, efficient air cooling for compact electronics. He specialises in aeroacoustics, fluid dynamics and thermal management, and in predicting and reducing noise from cooling systems. He completed his PhD in 2017 at the University of Auckland on wind turbine aeroacoustics, held postdoctoral positions at Chalmers University of Technology on aircraft landing gear and wing flap noise and at Trinity College Dublin on data centre storage system aeroacoustics, served as an SFI Research and Development Industry Fellow with Seagate Technology in Colorado on data centre noise, and was a Senior Research Scientist at Collins Aerospace working on ventilation and cabin pressure control for next-generation hybrid-electric regional aircraft.
PhD researchers
Eoin Oude Essink, Fulbright Scholar and PhD Researcher
Eoin is identifying the most suitable cooling technologies for Irish data centres, combining experiments on the Cyber Physical Server Benchmarking Platform with numerical modelling, and assessing how new technologies affect total cost of ownership. His project runs with colocation operators in Ireland, and his current work on how the operating environment affects server computational performance was presented at THERMINIC 2026. His PhD is supported through the MaREI and ERBE Centre for Doctoral Training programme, co-supervised with Prof. Tim Persoons (Trinity College Dublin) and Dr Xiangjie Chen (Loughborough University). He has been a visiting researcher at Trinity College Dublin, at Purdue University's Cooling Technologies Research Center as a Fulbright-Enterprise Ireland Scholar, where he built an experimental facility to study offset strip fin performance, and at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. His earlier work on adjustable air amplifiers was published at ITherm and THERMINIC in 2022. He holds BA, BAI and MAI degrees from Trinity College Dublin, studied at TU Delft, and worked as a thermal engineer in the cryogenics industry. In 2022 he and his brother Tadhg-Lorcan won the nTopology and EOS Responsible Part Challenge, and he took 3rd place at the 25th Sir Bernard Crossland Symposium. He also lectures in the School of Mechanical Engineering.
Profile: https://researchprofiles.tudublin.ie/en/persons/eoin-oude-essink/ | ORCID 0009-0004-9839-5414
David Salter, PhD Researcher
David develops novel cooling approaches for data centre servers, focusing on adjustable air amplifiers as an alternative to rotary fans, co-supervised with Prof. Tim Persoons (Trinity College Dublin). He has built and characterised a dedicated air amplifier test bed, presented at THERMINIC 2026, and his computational study of adjustable air amplifier performance was nominated for an ITherm 2025 Best Paper Award. He took 3rd place in the poster competition at the 29th Sir Bernard Crossland Symposium in 2026. Alongside his PhD he lectures in the School of Mechanical Engineering and researches at Trinity College Dublin, where he developed a bespoke heat recovery unit from TRL 3 to 6 with Magnitherm Ltd and was a lead researcher on Team DRIVE, winner of the 1.25 million euro 2050 Prize in Research Ireland's National Challenge Fund for direct contact dielectric cooling of electric vehicle battery packs. He has over a decade of industry experience in mechanical engineering.
Delara Soltani, PhD Researcher
Delara studies adjacent micro synthetic jets for mixing, pumping and cooling in microfluidic devices, co-supervised with Prof. Tim Persoons (Trinity College Dublin). Her thesis, Micro Synthetic Jets for Enhanced Microscale Mixing Applications, combines an integrated micropump and micromixer design with high-fidelity CFD using dynamic meshing on the MeluXina and ICHEC systems, and extends to liquid-cooled heat sinks for microelectronic devices. Her invited review of micromixing strategies appeared in the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering in 2024, and her study of the micromixer and micropump fluid dynamics was published in International Communications in Heat and Mass Transfer in 2026. She holds an MSc in aerospace engineering from the University of Tehran, took 3rd place in the paper presentation competition at the 27th Sir Bernard Crossland Symposium, teaches on the undergraduate programme and has co-supervised MSc and BSc micromixer projects.
Younis Abdelsalam, PhD Researcher
Younis has built a transparent, calibrated model of a commercial Irish data centre's cooling system from five years of high-resolution operational data, combining physics-based modelling with empirical regression. It reproduces annual cooling energy to within 2% and identifies metering anomalies and seasonal efficiency trends, giving operators a tool for benchmarking, diagnostics and optimisation, and was published in Applied Thermal Engineering in 2026. He is now extending it to cooling control strategies, chiller upgrades, rooftop solar PV and heat pump recovery of waste heat for district heating, co-supervised with Prof. Tim Persoons (Trinity College Dublin). A Chartered Engineer, Certified Energy Manager and Certified Measurement and Verification Professional, he holds MAI, BAI and BA degrees from Trinity College Dublin and works as a principal energy consultant leading industrial decarbonisation projects.
Mohamed AbdulAziz Arab, PhD Researcher
Mohamed investigates two-way fluid-structure interaction in an airfoil-driven hybrid energy harvester combining piezoelectric and electromagnetic transduction, co-supervised with Assoc. Prof. Seamus O'Shaughnessy (Trinity College Dublin). He studies how airfoil angle of attack and spring length govern harvester output, using coupled fluid, structural, modal, harmonic and electromagnetic simulation with experimental validation, and has carried out a numerical characterisation of macro fibre composite piezoelectric layers at low electric field. He holds an MSc from Qatar University and a BEng from the University of Portsmouth.
Links: ORCID 0000-0002-9664-5916
Sidharth P. Raut, PhD Researcher
Sidharth studies sessile droplet evaporation under electric fields and in microgravity, supporting thermal management for space and industrial applications, and combines computational and experimental methods across CFD, rig design and signal processing. He is also a Research Assistant on VascuSense, a Disruptive Technologies Innovation Fund project led by Versono Medical with Integer Ireland Medical and the University of Galway, developing a device for critical limb ischemia. He holds an MSc in computational fluid dynamics from Cranfield University and a BTech in aeronautical engineering, and has published in Langmuir and at ILASS Europe.
Students and visitors
We supervise MEng and BEng research projects each year, on topics such as free cooling for Irish data centres and micromixer optimisation, and host visiting researchers from partner universities.