Research Areas

Based on my experience of developing in-house lattice Boltzmann based solvers to address multifaceted problems concerning curved and moving boundary flows associated with fluid-structure interaction, I envision my future research to be directed along the following thrust areas:

1. Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs): My past research investigated the aerodynamic performance of a two-dimensional flexible flapping wing mimicking an insect flight. I intend to extend the work done until now to three-dimensional full body simulations where the effect of both spanwise and chordwise flexibility on the aerodynamic performance can be investigated. Moreover, the structural solver will be improved from the present localized flexibility technique to the continuum-stiffness approach by the employment of finite element methods (FEM). Thus, I intend to study the nature of flapping wing aerodynamics for direct application in the design of realistic, efficient and robust bio-inspired MAVs. In addition, the institute seed grant proposal has been submitted to conduct experiments on the flapping wing model of the MAV.

2. Advanced Scientific Computing: Lattice Boltzmann method has a huge potential in terms of parallelization when compared against coventional CFD techniques. Various optimization techniques (faster memory access, communication, SIMD, etc) to speed up the code can be explored on shared/distributed memory architectures using OpenMP/MPI. GPU based acceleration using CUDA/OpenCL/openACC is currently being explored.

3. Smart fluids: I am interested in the study of complex particle laden flows whose rheology is strongly influenced by the presence of electric or magnetic field. The viscosity of smart fluids increases by an order of and restored back within milliseconds and has applications in mechanical devices (valves, dampers, brakes, etc.), biomedical sector (reduction in blood viscosity, blood clotting, etc.), enhancement of heat transfer and microfluidic devices (microvalves, micropumps, etc.).

4. Turbulence: The inherent complexity of turbulence involves wide range of length and time scales that poses challenges in its analysis and requires advanced numerical tools to gain insights into transition flows, boundary layer separation and reattachment. I envisage the possibility of utilizing my solver and improving its robustness to investigate these phenomena for many applications ranging from diffusers, turbine and pump blades, pipe flows, unmanned aerial vehicles, turbulent wakes and jets, etc.

5. High Speed flows: Recent progress made in LBM displays a huge potential in simulating high speed compressible flows and I have devised solvers catering to this problem but at a nascent stage. I would like to expand my research horizon and investigate flow behavior for supersonic aircrafts, turbines and pumps, shock wave and other compressible phenomena.