PEOPLE
Faculty
Sumanta Acharya received his PhD from the University of Minnesota and his Bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (Kharagpur) in Mechanical Engineering. He is currently Professor and Department Chair of Mechanical, Materials and Aerospace Engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago. From 2010-2014, he served as the Program Director of the Thermal Transport Program in the Directorate of Engineering at the National Science Foundation (NSF). From 2014-2016, he was the Ring Companies Chair and Department Chair of the Mechanical Engineering Department at the Herff College of Engineering, University of Memphis. His academic career prior to 2014 was at Louisiana State University (LSU) where he was the L. R. Daniel Professor and the Fritz & Francis Blumer Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering (ME). He was the founding Director (in 2003) of the Center for Turbine Innovation and Energy Research (TIER) which focused on energy generation and propulsion research.
His research activities are centered around computational and experimental heat transfer, fluid mechanics and combustion with an application focus in gas turbines and heat exchangers. His scholarly contributions include mentoring nearly 85 post-doctoral researchers and graduate students, and publishing nearly 200 refereed journal articles and book chapters and over 230 refereed conference/proceedings papers. Professor Acharya was awarded the 2015 AIAA Thermophysics Award, the 2014 AIChE Donald Q. Kern Award, the 75th ASME Heat Transfer Division Medal (in 2013), and the 2011 ASME Heat Transfer Memorial Award in the Science category. He served as the Chair of the Heat Transfer Division (HTD) at ASME in 2016-2017 and currently serves ASME as a member of the Engineering Sciences Segment. He has served as the Associate Technical Editor of the ASME Journal of Heat Transfer, ASME Journal of Energy Resources Technology and the ASME Journal of Validation, Verification and Uncertainty Quantification. He also serves as a member of the Board for American Society of Thermal and Fluids Engineers (ASTFE).
Post Docs
None at this time
Doctoral Students
Chen Tang received a B.Sc degree of Material Shaping and Controlling Engineering in 2013 and a M.S degree of Power Engineering and Engineering Thermal Physics in 2016 from Northeast Electric Power University(China). He is working on developing methods to enhance the performance of impinging cooling.
Avijit Karmakar received his B.E degree in Mechanical Engineering from Bengal Engineering and Science University in 2013 and M.Tech degree from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 2015. His thesis was on numerical study of vortex induced vibrations in flow past a square cylinder close to a free surface. He is currently investigating flow hydrodynamics and heat transfer in falling film flows over array of tubes.
Master Students
Weicong Ma recieved a B.Eng degree in Mechatronics Engineering from Shandong Agricultural University, China in 2016. He is working on convective jet impingement with high speed micro-jets
Recent Graduates
Yousef Kanani received his bachelor degree from Urmia university, Mechanical Engineering department, Iran, and his M.Sc of fluid dynamics from the Iran University of Science and Technology. He is currently a PhD candidate at Mechanical, Materials and Aerospace Engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago. From 2015 to 2016, he has been a PhD student at University of Memphis where he was a recipient of the Herff fellowship. His research at the Heat Transfer Lab at Illinois Tech focuses on turbomachinery heat transfer specialized on the cooling technologies of turbine components.
Kaushik M. Pazhani received his B. Tech degree in Aerospace Engineering from SRM University, India in 2016. In his Senior year (2015 – 2016), he was a visiting student in Illinois Tech. He is currently a M.S in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering candidate in Illinois Institute of Technology. His Thesis research work is on, Experimental Investigation of the dynamics of an Inverted Serrated Flag.