Arvind Pattamatta Department of Mechanical Engineering Areas of interest: Micro- and Nano-scale Energy Transport

Arvind Pattamatta is an Associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He received his Ph.D. from SUNY, Buffalo, NY. He is the recipient of Alexander von Humboldt fellowship for the year 2013, INAE Young Engineer Award for the year 2015 and JSPS invitational fellowship for the year 2017. His research interests are in the area of micro and nanoscale energy transport. He has authored more than 90 publications in peer-reviewed journals and conferences.

How does your group keep HPCE cluster busy?

My group at the Heat Transfer Lab of Mechanical Engineering is involved in modeling multiscale multiphase flows. It includes developing solvers that can capture different phases of fluids and numerical simulations of phase change including evaporation and condensation phenomena at small scales. The major application that encompasses these problems is in energy efficient cooling technologies, e.g., electronic cooling. My group uses Virgo supercomputing cluster for parallel simulations of drop evaporation cooling, spray cooling, thermocapillary flows, etc., A complete understanding of the underlying physics of such problems requires support from numerical modeling and backed by experimental research.

How do you see HPCE landscape in the domain of your research area change over the years?

My group has been using Virgo cluster for parallel simulations of multiphase flows which are quite challenging on the computational resources. These simulations pose demand on memory usage and number of processors for faster turnaround. Newer algorithms for parallelization need to be implemented into open source CFD solvers to achieve better scalability. Simulations based on Molecular Dynamics and Lattice Boltzmann Methods have resulted in massively parallel computing resources such as GPU computing. CFD solvers, on the other hand, demonstrate relatively smaller scalability on CPU clusters. However, for larger computational domains and simulations involving multiscale problems, the current HPCF available at IIT Madras needs to undergo an expansion to cater to the demands in the near future.

What would you suggest to new faculty members and new students in your research area?

There are two areas of particular concern for new faculty members who focus on CFD modeling of multiphase flows. One is the development of a versatile solver with start-of-the-art models for multiscale multiphase simulations. A practical approach that is gaining popularity in recent years is to rely on open source CFD solvers and build additional modeling capabilities into them. The second area of concern is access to good HPC resources in the institute. The alternative is to follow a model similar to 'TeraGrid' in the U.S where central HPCF all over the country is linked and allowed to individuals depending on their annual computational requirement. Good quality computational tools and resources would go a long way in enabling cutting edge research in multiphase simulations.