ICE Seminar: Immersed Boundary Methods – A Powerful Tool for Translating Concepts into Simulations

Details

Rajat Mittal
Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Johns Hopkins University

MAE Faculty Host: Sivaramakrishnan Balachandar

12:30 pm – Coffee & Cookies
12:45 pm – Seminar MAE-A 303

The last 25 years have seen a phenomenal growth in the application of Immersed
Boundary Methods (IBMs) to the computational modeling of fluid flows. The
power of IBM lies in the fact that it frees the fluid dynamicist from the need to
generate body-conformal grids, thereby enabling rapid translation of concepts,
ideas, and even one’s imagination to simulations. The very early applications of the
IBM were in the areas of interfacial and biological fluid dynamics, and while these
remain the strongholds for these methods, application have expanded to
encompass most areas of fluids dynamics including fluid-structure interaction,
multiphase flows, acoustics, fluidic microdevices, heat transfer, design
optimization, reacting flows and others. This expanded scope has also been
accompanied by significant numerical and computational advancements in these
methods. In my talk I will review the history as well as the state-of-the-art of IBMs.
The particular emphasis of my talk will be on some areas that have been the focus
of my own research in recent years: IBMs with improved accuracy and
conservation properties, and application to biological flows, bioacoustics, and
fluid-structure interaction.

Biography
Rajat Mittal is Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University with a secondary
appointment in the School of Medicine. He received B. Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology
at Kanpur in 1989, the M.S in Aerospace from UF and Ph.D. in Applied Mechanics from The
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in 1995. His research interests include computational
fluid dynamics, biomedical engineering, biological fluid dynamics, fluid-structure interaction and flow
control. He has published over 200 technical articles on these topics and holds multiple patents in
associated technologies. He is the recipient of the 1996 Francois Frenkiel Award from the Division of
Fluid Dynamics of the APS, and the 2006 Lewis Moody as well as 2021 Freeman Scholar Awards from
tASME. He is a Fellow of ASME and APS, and an Associate Fellow of AIAA. He is an associate editor
of the Journal of Computational Physics, Frontiers of Computational Physiology and Medicine, the
Journal of Experimental Biology, and the International Journal for Numerical Methods in Biomedical
Engineering.