Research

Master's Thesis

During my masters I carried out Coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations of cross-linking of DGEBA epoxy resin and estimation of the adhesive strength under the guidance of Professor Sumit Basu. I used a serial version of the MD code DLPOLY for this purpose. Here, DGEBA a popular, commercially available epoxy resin, used in several structural applications, was the material under study.

A simple cross-linking algorithm was implemented in this code to simulate cross-linking of coarse-grained DGEBA beads. The cross-linked sample kept between two rigid substrates (each of these substrates is a layer of rigid atoms) is subjected to tension to estimate the adhesive strength and the fracture energy.

PhD Thesis

The thesis topic is Numerical simulations of high velocity impact phenomena in solids using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH). To this end a 2D FORTRAN code based on SPH was developed from scratch under the guidance of Professor Sumit Basu.

We followed the work by Randles and Libersky (1996, 2000) while developing the code. We adopted two point discretization of the domain - nodes and stress points - in our work.

The fracture of solids is implemented in a simple manner by deleting a node from the neighbor set of a stress point.

Contact between two different bodies is also taken care in a similar manner - based on a minimum distance criterion, a node of one body is included or excluded from the neighborhood of the stress point of the other body, when contact occurs or is lost.

Please click here to have a look at the problems solved using the SPH code.

Postdoctoral Work

I worked with Professor Erdogan Madenci in University of Arizona during my postdoctoral fellowship on Peridynamic Differential Operator based meshfree method.

Work at BITS - Pilani, Hyderabad Campus

I have started working on Peridynamics to simulate crack propagation and various other problems. The SPH code developed during my PhD is being modified to incorporate bond-based peridynamics formulation. A crack propagation simulation can be seen here.

Work at IIITDM Kancheepuram since May 2018

I have touched upon several things after joining in IIITDM Kancheepuram, and eventually settled on studying wave propagation phenomena in solids. Here I discuss briefly a couple of ongoing works.

Shock wave mitigation: Starting from where I left during my PhD, we are working on evaluating the constitutive models for polyurea and the role of this constitutive model in predicting the shock response of neat and polyurea coated materials. As of now we are focused on steel and concrete coated polyurea plates. I will keep updated as and when a major result is obtained in this work.

Thermoelasticity with finite wave speeds: I got interested in this work when I was trying to understand the laser-material interaction, the relevant heat transfer and melt-pool physics etc. Apparently, to overcome the paradox of infinite speed of heat propagation predicted by the Fourier's model, physicists have introduced non-Fourier heat conduction models.

A paper on modelling non-Fourier heat conduction phenomena was published in 2021. An extension of this work was presented in ATE-HEFAT 2021 in which we received the best paper award.

Meshfree methods: Within this topic, my current focus is on SPH and Peridynamics with applications to fracture in advanced materials.

Damage Mechanics: Although I am not directly working development of damage models, I get to read a lot on damage mechanics and looking forward to develop peridynamics based damage models under various loading conditions. A long way to go on this front. I will post as and when I get some useful and interesting content to share.