Dr. Ozel’s research experiences and collaborations have allowed him to work with various international academic, industrial, and governmental institutions. Through these projects, he has developed expertise in a wide range of disciplines within fluid mechanics from single phase turbulent flows to environmental fluid dynamics, and reactive flows to multi-scale modeling of fluid-particle flows.

His current research field is fluid-particle flows. He has been using the multi-scale modeling approach to develop theoretical and numerical models for fluid-particle flows. He has pursued three levels of modeling: Particle Resolved Direct Numerical Simulation at micro-scale, Euler-Lagrange approach at meso-scale, and Euler-Euler (two-fluid) two-phase modeling at macro-scale. At each scale, he has sought to systematically post-process simulation results to formulate coarse constitutive models for filtered two-fluid model and coarse-grained Euler- Lagrange approaches to simulation of industrial scale devices. His recent focus has been on particle assemblies manifesting cohesion through van der Waals, liquid bridge capillary forces and triboelectric charging.

Dr. Ozel has also been working on the development and deployment of state-of-the-art computational modeling and simulation tools to accelerate the commercialization of solvent- based carbon capture technologies. Specifically, he carries out finely resolved Volume of Fluid model simulations to predict the solvent/gas/structure interactions for different solvent and gas properties in various geometrical structures relevant to industry, ranging from inclined planes to spherical packed beds. The results are then used for subsequent development of coarse constitutive models for upscaling to device scale simulations.

In addition, he is interested in non-linear phenomena such as shear thickening or thinning, non-uniform shear profiles (shear banding) and wall slip in the rheology of dense granular suspensions. He uses discrete element method to extract macroscopic information such as particle stresses to formulate microstructure based rheological models. These models would be used for some pharmaceutical industrial applications, such as fluidized bed granulations, pharmaceutical tablet coating and drying mixers.

He also co-leads xFlow - Complex Flow Technologies, creates process technology and advanced digital modelling tools to support the transition of the manufacturing and energy sectors into a carbon neutral operation.

xFlow's mission is to bringing clean energy, new storage methods and energy vectors into traditional process engineering. They investigate how to implement at scale the direct use of clean energy sources, electrification, looping, CO₂ utilization and Power / Waste-to-X processes among other decarbonization strategies. They rethink traditional devices with a rigorous multiscale methodology to create efficient but also responsive units, and bring novel ideas from proof-of-concept (e.g. a vortex reactor, an oscillating reactor, irradiated units) into full-scale. They first study the physics limiting transport phenomena (momentum, heat, mass) in multiphase reactive flows at micro and mesoscale under different stimuli (e.g. deposition, acoustics, sintering, electrostatics) with experimental flow visualization (e.g. PIV) and high-fidelity models (e.g. LES, CFD/DEM). This microscale information is fed into a macroscopic model combining traditional heuristic methods and advanced statistics / machine learning, and the resulting hybrid digital twins are applied to design more efficient and robust devices (e.g. solar powered reactor), and new control, and monitoring tools.