Ph.D. Students Receive Awards at the National Congress on Computational Mechanics

Kaustubh Khedkar (left) is currently a third year joint doctoral program student in the ME department. He received the 16th U.S. National Congress on Computational Mechanics conference award, which allowed him to present his on-going doctoral research at the congress held in Chicago (July 25 - 29, 2021). Kaustubh presented a novel method to implement a real-time control strategy within fully-resolved computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations of wave energy converter (WEC) devices. His research demonstrated that in high energetic sea- states and under aggressive control action, the full-resolved CFD simulations are closer to reality than the linear potential flow theory-based models that are primarily used in the literature. Earlier this year Kaustubh also presented his research at the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics conference on Computational Science and Engineering (March 1 - 5, 2021), wherein he presented fully-resolved CFD simulations of the novel inertial sea wave energy converter (ISWEC) device. This work got published in the journal Ocean Engineering, which is titled “The inertial sea wave energy converter (ISWEC) technology: Device- physics, multiphase modeling, and simulations”. Kaustubh’s research was made possible by supercomputing facilities at SDSU (Fermi cluster) and at San Diego Supercomputing Center (NSF XSEDE clusters).

Ramakrishnan Thirumalaisamy (right), a Ph.D. student who works with Dr. Amneet Bhalla in the Computational Fluid Dynamics and Flow Physics Laboratory, received the 16th U.S. National Congress on Computational Mechanics conference award at the congress held in Chicago (July 25 - 29, 2021). Ramakrishnan presented a novel approach to impose Neumann and Robin boundary conditions on complex geometries in a fictitious domain framework. This technique has numerical applications in computational heat and fluid dynamics problems, such as melting/solidification of ice, electrohydrodynamics, and multiphase flows, etc. The presented work has now been published in the Journal of Computational Physics titled “Handling Neumann and Robin boundary conditions in a fictitious domain volume penalization framework”. Earlier this year, Ramakrishnan’s work on the order of accuracy of the numerical method was published in another Journal of Computational Physics article titled “Critique on Volume penalization for inhomogeneous Neumann boundary conditions modeling scalar flux in complicated geometry”. Ramakrishnan presented the earlier work at the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics - Computational Science and Engineering Conference (March 1 - 5, 2021). Ramakrishnan’s work is supported by the SDSU University Graduate Fellowship and NSF award OAC1931368.