I am a second year, PhD scholar at the Chemical Engineering Dept., IISc from Bangalore. I have a passion for research and spend my free time going on long distance bicycle rides or runs. I play the bass guitar and am an avid numismatist.

Granular media is sub class of materials that exhibit properties inbetween a solid and a fluid. These include food grains, dry powders, sands, ores and many other industrially used materials. They are ubiquitious in their usage yet there is not enough understanding of their flow properties.

My current project is to study their flow in a Taylor-Couette Cell. The flow generated in a Taylor-Couette Cell falls in the class of viscometric flows. Our group's recent work (Krishnaraj and Nott, 2016) point to the presence of an unusual seconday flow in this device. This can be see by the movement of particles on the surface of the media in the Couette cell (See video below). Through, experiments and Discrete Element Method (DEM) simulations, I wish to see if

• The secondary flows can be eliminated altogether to allow for a simple viscometric setup
• There exist other geometries where such complications don't arise
• The secondary flows can be incorporated into a model that can be solved