Midwest Mechanics Seminar Series: Rajat Mittal

The Department of Mechanical, Materials, and Aerospace Engineering present the Midwest Mechanics Seminar Series featuring guest speaker Rajat Mittal, professor of mechanical engineering at the Johns Hopkins University, who will give a presentation on “Dissecting the Causality of Pressure Forces in Vortex Dominated Flows—From Fish Schools to Noisy Drones.” This event is open to the public and will take place on Wednesday, September 11, from 12:45–1:45 p.m. in room 104 of the Rettaliata Engineering Center.

Abstract

Pressure-induced drag and lift are key to the performance of wings, rotors, and propellers; undulating fins and flapping wings generate forces that are key to locomotion in fish, birds, and insects; time-varying fluid dynamic forces drive flutter and flow-induced vibrations of flexible structures in engineering and biology, and these same forces enable the extraction of energy from flow via devices such as wind-turbines. Pressure on a body immersed in a flow is however induced simultaneously by vortices, acceleration reaction (a.k.a. added mass) effects associated with body and/or flow acceleration, and viscous diffusion of momentum, and determining the relative contribution of these different mechanisms on surface pressure remains one of the most important and fundamental issues in fluid dynamics. I will describe the force partitioning method (FPM), a new data-enabled method that partitions pressure forces into components due to vorticity, acceleration reaction and viscous diffusion. FPM has been used to gain new insights into a variety of vortex dominated flows including dynamic stall in pitching foils, vortex-induced vibration of bluff-bodies, hydrodynamics of schooling fish and rough-wall boundary layers, and results from these analyses will be presented. Application of FPM to data generated from experiments will also be described. Finally, FPM has been extended to aeroacoustics, and applications of the aeroacoustic partitioning method (APM) to dissect aeroacoustic noise in engineering and biological flows will be presented.

Biography

Rajat Mittal is professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins University with a secondary appointment in the School of Medicine. He received his Bachelor of Technology degree from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur in 1989, his M.S in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Florida, and his Ph.D. in Applied Mechanics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1995. His research interests include computational fluid dynamics, vortex dominated flows, biomedical engineering, biological fluid dynamics, fluid-structure interaction, and flow control. He has published more than 200 technical articles and multiple patents in these application areas. He is the recipient of the 1996 Francois Frenkiel and the 2022 Stanley Corrsin Awards from the Division of Fluid Dynamics of the American Physical Society, the 2006 Lewis Moody, as well as 2021 Freeman Scholar Awards from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). He is a fellow of ASME and the American Physical Society, and an associate fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He is an associate editor of the Journal of Computational Physics, Frontiers of Computational Physiology and Medicine, and serves on the editorial boards of the International Journal for Numerical Methods in Biomedical Engineering, and Physics of Fluids.