February Interview
In this feature, we wish to acquaint you with the new faculty of IITB one by one who will try to introduce themselves through an interview conducted by two alumni, Profs. Sutanu Sarkar and Ananth Iyer. Prof Sarkar is Professor and Chair, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California at San Diego and is the past Chair of Legacy Advisory Committee (LAC) of YFA. Prof Iyer is Susan Bulkeley Butler Chair in Operations Management, Director, DCMME & GSCMI, Krannert School of Management, Purdue University and the current Chair of LAC.
This month's i.e. February's interview features Prof. Salil Kulkarni, Mechanical Engg, IITB.
Q1: Give us a brief background about yourself.
A: I was born and brought in Pune. I completed my BE in Mechanical Engineering from the Government College of Engineering, Pune. I worked for a year in Tata Motors after which I joined the ME program in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Science. I then did my Ph.D from the Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics at Cornell University under the guidance of Prof. Subrata Mukherjee. After my PhD I worked as Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University for 3 years with Profs. Jan Achenbach, Shridhar Krishnaswamy and Brian Moran. I returned to India in July 2006. I then worked for about 15 months at Cummins Research and Technology, Pune and for about 13 months at GE Global Research, Bangalore, before finally joining IITB as an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering in April 2009.
I am primarily interested in the field of computational and applied mechanics and my hobbies include trekking and reading.
Q2: Tell us the summary of your thesis research and its impact. You could assume a lay but interested audience for this section.
A: The bulk of my doctoral research at Cornell was concerned with developing new numerical techniques to solve Laplace's equation in potential theory and Navier's equations in linear elasticity. These topics have been studied in great detail in literature, both in terms of theory and numerical implementations. But in spite of the maturity in this field, there still exists problems for which the current numerical methods are inefficient. For example, if one is interested in obtaining field quantities at only few points in an body, one still has to first discretize the whole domain or the surface, obtain nodal values by typically solving a large system of equations and then obtain the quantities at the point of interests using interpolation. The technique which I focused on was a local method called the Boundary Walk Method (BWM), which gives the solution directly at the point of interest. It involves starting with an appropriate integral formulation, representing the solution in a form of a power series and then evaluating individual terms in the series using Monte Carlo integration. Also, it does not involve solving large system of equations. The applicability of this method was demonstrated by solving sample problems in two dimensional domains for both linear elasticity and potential theory.
Q3: What are your research and teaching plans. What have you accomplished the months since you joined? What is ongoing? How many students have you started working with?
A: I am primarily interested in the field of computational and applied mechanics. Computational simulations are routinely preformed by the mechanics community to analyze and understand complex phenomena. In spite of the availability of large computational resources, solutions to such problems are invariably time intensive. My work is concerned with development of efficient numerical techniques for the solution of large nonlinear problems in mechanics. I am focusing on methods commonly referred to 'Reduced Order Modeling' techniques. These methods help to reduce the computational effort by decreasing the dimensionality of the original problem by using formal algorithms from linear algebra and also by exploiting our current understanding of the problem.
I have been involved in teaching a graduate level core course (Machine Design), a graduate level experimental mechanics lab and an undergraduate level core course in mechanics during my first semester here. This semester I am teaching a graduate level course on Finite Elements and Boundary Elements.
I am currently guiding four masters students (2 – guide, 2- co-guide), 1 PhD student (co-guide) and a final year BTech student. I am also working with a 2nd year BTech student who is interested in developing simple car models in order to understand their dynamic behaviour .
Q4: If you have a lab with specific hardware or you use novel software, please describe. If there are specific companies in India or anywhere in the world who would be consumers of your research results, please elaborate.
A: Along with a few other colleagues in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, I am in the process of setting up a dedicated computational mechanics facility in the department. I am from the Design stream while my colleagues are from the Fluids and Thermal Engineering stream. The idea is to get the students working in different but related fields (solid mechanics and fluid mechanics) together to so to increase their interaction which will hopefully lead to cross-disciplinary research.
I am also informally collaborating with my friends in GE-Global Research in developing reduced order modeling techniques for solving transient nonlinear problems. If we are successful, then I could probably go for a formal collaboration with companies interested in carrying similar work.
Q5: While it may be difficult to project, please let us know what your long term goals are.
A: My long term objective is to develop a dedicated computational mechanics group in the Mechanical Engineering Department and if possible, at the Institute level. This group will not only be carrying out basic research in the field of computational mechanics but at the same time will be actively involved in helping the industry/defense laboratories address specific practical problems.
Q6: What opportunities have you had to develop national and international contacts? What
conferences have you been to or intend to go to in the near future? We may be able to provide a list of alumni in the area if you are available to meet them.
A: I am actively collaborating with Prof. Jan Achenbach at Northwestern University. I hosted one of his Ph.D students who had come to IITB to work with me for about a month.
Q7: Do you see a broader societal role for your research? If so, describe.
A: My work is mostly theoretical and computational in nature. I am therefore not sure if my work can have any direct impact on the society. But I do hope the methods/techniques that we develop here at IITB will be useful for researchers in academics and industry in carrying out their work.
Q8: Finally, if there is a website that interested alums can refer to learn more about your research, please provide the url.
A: http://www.me.iitb.ac.in/~salil/
