Today Professor Amra Hasečić shares her career story with us and invites secondary school students from BiH to apply for STEM Youth Camp 2022 (https://www.annt.ba/bs/article/89/stem-youth-camp-syc-2022), where she will give a lecture.

"My name is Amra Hasečić and I am currently in the process of being appointed Associate Professor at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the University of Sarajevo. The departments where I teach are Energy and HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) Engineering, and Process and Environmental Engineering. A typical working day consists of teaching-related duties and duties related to my research. As far as teaching is concerned, these are usually the duties of preparing lectures (I teach the courses Fundamentals of Fluid Mechanics, Introduction to Computational Fluid Mechanics, Thermal Power Plants, District and Distributed Energy Supply Systems, and Optimisation Methods in Thermal Engineering), or rather updating lectures, since they need to keep pace with current developments in the world of science, then marking student papers/exams, and supervising final theses. In addition, since I am a guest lecturer twice a year at BOKU University in Vienna, Austria, and at Brno University of Technology – Institute of Aerospace Engineering, Czech Republic, part of my duties also relates to preparing those lectures. The other part of my duties, which I must admit I am a little fonder of, is scientific research.

My sphere of interest is numerical simulations, i.e. computational fluid dynamics (CFD – Computational Fluid Dynamics). CFD is an applied science whose main aim is to use computers to obtain new knowledge about various problems in the fields of fluid mechanics, heat transfer and chemical processes within fluids, which would be quite challenging, if not impossible, to do through experiments. For example, using computational fluid dynamics we can analyse airflow through a residential area, which, let's be realistic, would be very challenging to analyse experimentally. CFD allows us to change variables in various processes very easily and practically at no cost, such as the thickness of a turbine blade, the curvature of a car bonnet, the diameter of a bubble and even the appearance and position of buildings in a neighbourhood, and in this way to obtain a large amount of data that we can then analyse further. 

My research day consists of spending 95% of my time at the computer, creating simulations, analysing results or simply reviewing the literature and previous research in the field. I am currently analysing how deposits on multi-hole orifice plates affect flow parameters such as pressure drop, discharge coefficient, etc., or rather how neglecting these deposits in research (which is mostly the case) leads to results that are inaccurate and deviate from the actual results. This is very important for industry, since orifice plates are the most commonly used flow meters due to their simplicity and low-cost design. What is particularly appealing about research in CFD is that you are not tied to a location for your research; you can do research from anywhere on the planet. The most important thing is to have a laptop, licensed software and remote access to databases.

As with any scientist, the most important skill is the ability to think logically and deduce. Some of it is probably a genetic predisposition, and some you learn by doing scientific research during your studies (seminar papers that require an extensive literature review and analysis of problems whose solution is not known, final theses, projects, etc.). Since I am based in BiH, unfortunately industry has not recognised the importance of the highest level of education, i.e. the doctorate, so most scientific research is carried out at the University or at research centres within the University. However, since CFD engineer is a sought-after profession in Europe and around the world, I am sure that the time will soon come when industry in BiH will realise the importance of this profession, and more generally the advantages of numerical simulations of fluid flows, and research itself will then be based on the real needs of industry.

I finished the First Bosniak Gymnasium as Student of the Generation and, probably as with most Students of the Generation at that time, the options under consideration were the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the University of Sarajevo, which is the one I eventually chose. I must admit the race was close, and my love of processes in nature, heat transfer, fluid flow, the action of forces on a rigid body and the like prevailed by a hair. I have not regretted it for a single moment, and from the very beginning of my studies I was “like a fish in water”; my love of studying the processes around us only grew during my studies, as can be seen from my choice of career, i.e. continuing at the same faculty, since I obtained my PhD at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of UNSA. My PhD was the development of a mathematical model and a numerical method that would allow us, for example, to model the actual heat transfer through lava flowing down a volcano, or heat transfer in the process of producing glass and glass bottles, with a focus on radiation as the dominant mode of heat transfer in those processes, and in particular on radiation through the fluid itself and the influence of radiation on the shape and position of the surface of the given fluid."