Ashish Pathak, PhD

Assistant Professor,
Mechanical Engineering, IIT Jodhpur
Curriculum Vitae
Phone: +91-129-280-1525
Email: apathak[at]iitj[dot]ac[dot]in
Office: ME309

About me

I joined IIT Jodhpur in May 2021, and am currently an Assistant Professor in the dept. of Mechanical Engineering.

I received my bachelor's and master's degrees in Mechanical Engineering at IIT Kharagpur. While pursuing undergraduate research under the supervision of Prof. Ghosh Moulic, I got interested in numerical methods for modeling fluid flows. I found problems involving discontinuities, such as shocks and multiphase flows, especially interesting because they are difficult to model. Taylor series based methods simply do not work in such problems because solutions are not smooth.

In my undergraduate thesis, I assessed the performance of various numerical methods in modeling shocks in an adaptive mesh framework. For my master's thesis, I wrote an in-house code to model mixed convection film condensation over a flat vertical plate. To remove the stiffness in the notional matrix, I used coordinate transformation and body fitted mesh to modify the governing equations, which were further solved using the perturbation method.

I pursued my doctoral studies at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth under the supervision of Prof. Mehdi Raessi. Here, I developed a multiphase flow solver that can model the two-way interaction between two-phase fluid flow and moving rigid bodies. Since the interfaces, which are locations of discontinuities, underwent severe deformation, utilizing a body-fitted mesh was not feasible. I used the volume-of-fluid (VoF) method to represent and track the interfaces on a fixed grid. VoF methods are especially good at handling large topological changes in the interface. Since fixed grids were used, the numerical issues associated with remeshing and remapping were automatically eliminated. I applied this solver to real-life Ocean Wave Energy Converters and obtained important results on dynamic similarity.

After receiving my doctoral degree, I was offered a Postdoctoral research fellow position at UMass Dartmouth. Here I worked on a project towards characterizing size and velocity distribution of secondary droplets created as a result of spray-wall interaction. I also developed a phase change solver that can accurately compute evaporation of deforming interfaces.

Education

Year
School
Degree
2017
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
PhD in Engineering and Applied Science
2011
IIT Kharagpur
M. Tech. in Thermal Science and Engineering
2011
IIT Kharagpur
B. Tech. in Mechanical Engineering

Research Interests

My research interests include many application areas of high-performance computing and multiphase flows, that include, but not limited to the following:

Awards

Year
Award
Awarded by
2020
Milton Van Dyke Award
American Physical Society
2016
Best Poster Award
CSCVR, UMass Dartmouth
2014
APS Travel Grant
American Physical Society
2011
Institue Silver Medal
IIT Kharagpur
2011
Dwarka Nath Singh Memorial Prize
IIT Kharagpur