Guest Lecture on "CFD for Engineers: A Basic Design Tool for Fluid/Thermal/Biomedical Flow Problems"

On March 17, 2025, the Mechanical Engineering department hosted a seminar by Dr. Prasad Patnaik, Professor at IIT Madras, Chennai. The seminar, titled "CFD for Engineers: A Basic Design Tool for Fluid/Thermal/Biomedical Flow Problems," provided valuable insights into the role of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) as a fundamental design tool for engineers.

Dr. Patnaik, a leading expert in CFD, specializes in fluid-structure interaction tools for fluid-thermal systems. His work spans diverse areas such as controlling vortex-induced vibrations, heat transfer in rod bundles, blast loading on structures, and blood flow dynamics in the cardiovascular and cerebral systems. Dr. Patnaik's research also bridges engineering and medicine, as he collaborates with surgeons to develop solutions for biofluid mechanics with real-world clinical impact.

During the seminar, Dr. Patnaik introduced the basic steps involved in computational fluid dynamics for engineering analysis and design. He explained how a wide spectrum of fluid, thermal, and biomedical flow problems can be solved and solutions can be designed using CFD tools. This is achieved by solving the governing equations of mass, momentum, and energy with suitable boundary conditions. Numerically discretizing and formulating the algebraic equations is the real crux of computational fluid dynamics.

The seminar also discussed various applications of CFD that are of interest to mechanical engineers, such as external flow over a car and flow through a cardiovascular pump. Additionally, Dr. Patnaik shared examples from his current research on the mechanical design solutions for facilitating virtual surgeries, cardiovascular valve, and pump designs using CFD-based tools.

The seminar was well-attended by mechanical engineering students, who found the insights provided by Dr. Patnaik to be highly valuable in understanding the role of CFD as a fundamental design tool for tackling fluid, thermal, and biomedical challenges.