I’m a research scholar (PhD) in the department of chemical engineering, IISc, Bangalore. I like to learn new things and research in one such field where you get to learn new stuff every day. I play chess which interestingly is more like research.

The flow of granular materials is a topic of intense research, due to its diverse practical applications, such as the processing of food grains, mineral ores and pharmaceutical powders. The behaviour of these materials has been poorly understood and there is therefore a lack of robust constitutive equations that can describe the system completely. An alternative way to study granular materials is by using computational particle dynamics simulations, where the motion of each particle evolves according to Newton's laws of motion. Such simulations of granular materials have been done mostly using the Discrete Element Method (DEM), which effectively allows particle inter-penetration to model their deformation in real flow.

The rheology of fluids is mostly studied using the cylindrical Couette setup. The cylindrical Couette cell is a viscometric device wherein the gravity and velocity gradient directions are orthogonal to each other, and due to its axisymmetry, averaged properties can be easily computed. Recent experiments of our group have shown that the stress profile on the outer wall of the Couette cell is counter-intuitive and differs from the predictions of plasticity theories. DEM study can provide us finer details about the system than possible by experiment.

We intend to understand the counter-intuitive behaviour by developing appropriate models based on the DEM study.