Sudama Bhati

Sudama Bhati

PhD candidate, [Department], Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur
Advisor: [Prof. Name]

I study what happens when a shock wave hits a liquid droplet: how the drop deforms, how it breaks up, and how that depends on the drop's shape and on whether it sits free in the flow or rests on a wall.

My work combines shock-tube experiments with high-speed shadowgraphy and compressible multiphase simulations in OpenFOAM, with each one used to check the other.

Download CV (PDF) Google Scholar ORCID GitHub
Schematic of a planar shock moving toward a liquid droplet Ms ρg, U (post-shock) d₀ spherical sessile t* = (d₀/U)√(ρₗ/ρ_g)
A planar shock (Ms) moving toward a free spherical droplet and a sessile droplet on a wall. Swap this for one of your own shadowgraph sequences.

Research

Free droplets

Shock-induced breakup of spherical drops

How a droplet deforms and fragments behind a passing shock, and how the breakup mode and timing scale with the Weber and Ohnesorge numbers.

Wall-bound droplets

Sessile droplets under shock loading

Droplets resting on a surface, where the wall changes the flow around the drop, scaled on the volume-equivalent diameter D0 across the RTP and SIE regimes.

Geometry

Truncated oblate spheroids

How the initial drop shape, beyond the ideal sphere, changes deformation and breakup under the same shock conditions.

Methods

Experiments

  • Shock tube experiments with high-speed shadowgraphy and backlit imaging
  • Digital image processing to extract drop deformation and breakup metrics
  • Uncertainty analysis of the measured quantities

Simulations

  • Compressible multiphase CFD in OpenFOAM-v2212 (ESI)
  • Meshing with snappyHexMesh
  • Validated against my own shock-tube data and published results
We = ρgU²d₀/σWeber number: aerodynamic force over surface tension
Oh = μl/√(ρlσd₀)Ohnesorge number: viscous damping of the liquid
Re = ρgUd₀/μgReynolds number of the post-shock gas flow
ρl/ρgLiquid-to-gas density ratio
MsIncident shock Mach number
t* = (d₀/U)√(ρl/ρg)Ranger & Nicholls breakup time; U and ρg from normal-shock relations

Publications

[Authors], [Title]
[Journal, e.g. Physics of Fluids], [Year] · DOI · PDF
[Authors], [Title]
[Journal / under review / in preparation], [Year]

Conference talks

[Talk title]
[Conference, city, year]

Software and tools

Research toolkit

OpenFOAM-v2212snappyHexMeshPythonMATLABLaTeX / TikZInkscapeZoteroQuarto

Side projects

  • A FastAPI bridge that connects local LLMs to tools. Code
  • Android apps built in Kotlin with Jetpack Compose. Code

Contact

Email
you@iitk.ac.in [replace]
Address
[Lab name], [Department], IIT Kanpur, Kanpur 208016, Uttar Pradesh, India
Profiles
Google Scholar · ORCID · GitHub · LinkedIn