Abdus Samad Department of Ocean Engineering Areas of interest: Marine Energy, Fluid Machinery, Optimization

Dr. Abdus Samad is a Professor in the Department of Ocean Engineering at IIT Madras. He obtained his B.Tech. and M.Tech. in Mechanical Engineering from Aligarh Muslim University, and Ph.D. (2008) from Inha University, South Korea. He worked at the University of Aberdeen from 2008 to 2010. Dr. Samad’s research interests include Marine Energy, Fluid Machinery, and Optimization. He focuses on innovation-based research to be translated into products or implemented practically. The vast energy stored in the ocean in the form of tide and wave should be used for mankind and our nation. In this direction, he founded the Wave Energy and Fluids Engineering Lab at IIT Madras which consists of wave energy harvesting turbine testing machinery and pump testing machinery. He published more than 100 research articles listed in Scopus and filed several patents. He authored a book on Fluid Machinery (Wiley, 2019). He delivered several national and international lectures in India and abroad. He is the editor of four reputed international journals. He executed several international projects, organized international conferences, workshops, and seminars. Those enhanced international visibility of IIT Madras and fostered new collaborations.

As a result of these activities, he received a national award from the Institution of Engineers – India (2014) and the Young Scientist Award (2016) from MTSC-Kerala. He received many fellowships (DUO-India Fellowship 2020-UK, PACE Fellowship 2019-USA, Brainpool Fellowship 2016-South Korea, DAAD Fellowship 2015-Germany, and IDV Fellowship 2011-UK). He was elected a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Institution for Mechanical Engineers-UK, and The Institutions of Engineers-India. He is a Chartered Engineer of the Engineering Council-UK.

Apart from the professional and academic activities, he is actively involved in social activities at different levels. He often visits high schools to deliver motivational lectures and has an interest in Bengali literature. In 2019, he authored a Bengali memoir Swapna Tarir Majhi.

How does your group keep HPCE cluster busy?

Our research group works on a wide range of topics related to numerical and experimental analysis of wave energy conversion devices, turbines used in marine energy converters and pumps for transporting high viscous fluids. We use the HPCE cluster for the numerical analysis of turbines and pumps using mainly the commercial CFD solvers ANSYS CFX and FLUENT solvers and also open-source solver OpenFOAM. The HPCE solver is mainly useful for our research while carrying out unsteady simulation in turbines used for wave energy conversion or wake analysis in tidal turbines. Also, in recent times we have coupled optimization code with commercial software to carry out CFD based optimization. This was impossible without an HPCE cluster.

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

Over the last decade, the high-performance computing has become an indispensable tool for CFD based research. Because of the availability of HPCE facilities, more research articles are being published which concentrates on more accurate simulation like LES and DNS which require HPCE facilities. The Virgo super cluster has played an important role for our research. The new Aqua super cluster are already being used by our group, and the simulation time have reduced significantly. This allows us to spend more time on in-depth research on the topic of interest.

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

Firstly, I would suggest not to use only commercial software for research purpose. While moving towards opensource solvers is always a better idea, coupling of commercial tools with other in-house codes (such as CFD based optimization) could be of interest to related industries. Secondly, I would suggest the students to learn the basics of parallel computing. The new Aqua cluster website is very well maintained and every information is mentioned clearly to run any simulation even without knowing much about the cluster configuration. However, the students should learn in detail about the working of a cluster rather than just using it as a black box.