His Excellency Prof. Ebrahim Al Hajri is currently the President of Khalifa University, and Professor of Practice in Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering.
Earlier, he was the Senior Vice-President of Support Services, leading the University’s operational plans, budget, and administrative and financial strategy.
H. E. Prof. Al Hajri has more than 10 years of extensive experience in management, engineering and technology, research and innovation in the field of higher education. In 2012, he was appointed as Director of External Relations and Collaborations at The Petroleum Institute, which later merged with Khalifa University. He joined The Petroleum Institute as a faculty member in 2009 after receiving his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Maryland, US. He received his Master’s in Mechanical Engineering from the Colorado University, and his bachelor’s from University of Arizona, US.
In 2018, H. E. Prof. Al Hajri became Director of Continuing Education at Khalifa University, while also serving as the Vice-Chancellor of Emirates College for Advanced Education (ECAE), where he helped transform the college into a leading postgraduate institution, increasing the research funding and output by three-fold. He also led an exceptional strategic shift in college support activities, delivering service automation, live institutional data & information dashboards, improved budget utilization, and optimized procurement operations.
H. E. Prof. Al Hajri is a recipient of several awards, including Best Service Award 2012 at The Petroleum Institute, The Fluid Engineering Division’s Honorable Mention in the 2011 Young Engineering Paper Contest from ASME, Rashid Award for Scientific Outstanding 2010, Special Recognition Award of ADNOC HSE Awards 2010, First place winner PI Sustainability Award 2010, and Appreciation for being granted funding by ASHRAE for a distinguished research and Grant-in-aid from the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineering.
H. E. Prof. Al Hajri is a former President of the ASHRAE Falcon Chapter in the UAE and has been serving as a member of the Chapter’s board of governors since 2010. He is also a member and a chair of several technical committees in ASHRAE and ASME.
H. E. Prof. Al Hajri has published a number of articles in highly recognized journals and conference proceedings. He has organized and co-organized local and international workshops and conferences and has been invited to speak at these events. He also serves as a reviewer of several journals in the area relevant to thermal-fluids and energy systems.
His research interest areas are within conventional and micro-channel mass/heat exchangers design, micro reactors, and energy efficiency and recovery. He has worked on research projects including evaluation of heat transfer and pressure drop of enhanced tubes, external fouling of a fin-fan heat exchanger, waste heat recovery using double absorption systems, and exploration of geothermal heat diffusion mechanism.
Compared to conventional gas and oil processing reactors, microreactors are often two order magnitudes smaller, provide much tighter reaction control, increase product quality and output, and significantly decrease energy consumption. However, despite their outstanding performance and overwhelming advantages, microreactors occupy only a small part of the gas and oil processing market. One of the reasons for this is the absence of adequate, cost effective microreactor fabrication technology.
Microreactors form a basis for the potential future downscaling of existing chemical processes, allowing tremendous reductions in capital and operating cost. They provide finer control of conditions, allow for faster process times, and improve safety in operation. Also, they should not encounter a significant problem scaling from laboratory-sized systems to commercial-sized systems, since their operating principle will simply allow them to be stacked together modularly. Of critical importance to the microreactors’ capability to make the jump into industrial applications is the mixing efficiency, which controls the reaction rates and the yield expected from a reactor. Due to the scale of the systems, laminar flow is almost always encountered, which means that the vortices typically associated with turbulent flow are often missing. Instilling vortices into the flows to encourage mixing is accordingly a matter of construction of mixer channels.
