Vasudevan Raghavan Department of Mechanical Engineering Areas of interest: Simulations of homogeneous and heterogeneous flames, Particle laden flows, Modelling of droplet evaporation and combustion, Coal and biomass gasification and combustion, Fire research

Vasudevan Raghavan is currently working as a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM), India. He obtained his PhD degree from IITM and has carried out his post-doctoral research in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA. He has graduated 11 PhD and 18 MS scholars till date. He has authored about 115 international peer reviewed journal articles, and a book on Combustion Technology. He teaches courses such as Fundamentals of Combustion, Theory of Fire Propagation, Combustion Technology and Applied Thermodynamics.

How does your group keep the HPCE cluster busy?

The primary research area of my group is numerical modelling of multi-phase and reactive flows, considering gas, liquid and solid fuels. We use in-house code written in FORTRAN for conducting fundamental studies of droplet evaporation and combustion, heterogeneous flame simulations and flame spread over liquid fuel surfaces. Comprehensive reactive flow simulations using short as well as detailed chemical kinetics mechanism have been carried out in Ansys FLUENT. We have started using OpenFOAM for reactive flow simulations recently. For fire research, a freeware called Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) is used by our group. We have been successful in simulating fire spread over solid and liquid fuels.

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

HPCE has been extremely useful in our research. Our in-house FORTAN code is capable of running in OpenMP parallel configuration. We have executed several of our cases in HPCE. Several of our scholars have been using Ansys FLUENT, available is HPCE, implementing User Defined Functions as per our needs. We have also been successful in installing OpenFOAM and FDS in HPCE to execute our cases. We envisage that the new HPCE cluster would be more powerful and would be much helpful for our group.

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

Instead of opting on licensed software alone, open source packages and in-house codes should also be used. Optimizing the execution of these codes and using GPU architectures would be highly beneficial. Simulations are going to be significantly useful in the analysis of several problems and can provide deeper physical insights.