Dr Saman is currently a Senior Lecturer in Chemical Engineering at Monash University Malaysia campus and have been teaching both fluid mechanics and separation processes. He was also a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial College London. His research was on hydrodynamics and mass transfer within heap leaching systems, which are hydrometallurgical processes to extract precious and base metals from its low grade ores. Dr Saman was awarded his PhD in Minerals Processing by the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial College London in December 2012. His thesis was entitled “Hydrodynamics of unsaturated particle beds pertaining to heap leaching”. In it, he has explored the fluid flow behaviour in heap leaching systems experimentally by measuring liquid holdup and tracer transport.

Dr Saman has extensive mining, minerals processing, chemical process engineering, and industrial rock blasting teaching and research experiences at Imperial College London, Monash University Malaysia campus (Department of Chemical Engineering) and University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka (Department of Earth Resources Engineering). Most of it focused on processing of low grade ores, improving the efficiency of metal extraction systems, porous media flow studies, waste management (electronic waste or e-waste) and sustainability aspects of minerals processing. His work provided a useful link between minerals engineering, waste management and unsaturated fluid flow in mineral extraction systems encouraging research collaborations.

The behaviour of unsaturated gravity driven flow of liquid through packed beds of particles is important to a number of different processes ranging from trickle bed reactors (TBRs) in chemical engineering to heap leaching in minerals processing as it is the major driver in the mass transport of reagents to the particle surface as well as for the transport of the dissolved species out of the system. This flow is complex as it is unsaturated and occurs through a network of channels between particles typically in the range of millimetres to a few centimetres in size. These flows exhibit channelling/preferential flow brought about by a combination of inhomogeneity in the particle beds and gravity fingering, which reduce recovery efficiencies. My research is currently focusing on understanding of channelling flow features in particle bed systems and novel methods will also be employed to minimise these adverse flow features. In addition, the particles themselves are porous and hold liquid within channels and fractures with dimensions much smaller than those of the liquid within the inter-particle spaces. Inter-particle flow features thus need to be separated from intra-particle flow and it will be addressed by performing experimental and simulation studies.

• CHE2161 - Mechanics of Fluids
• CHE3165 - Separation Processes