Other research
Projects outside my main research areas. Some became papers and some did not, and I learned a great deal from each.
Multilayer insulation for cryogenic superconducting motors
M.S. thesis, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2025. Co-author, Cryogenics (2025).
Superconducting electric machines promise very high power density for applications such as electric aircraft, but the rotor has to be held near 50 K. In a cryogen-free design the rotor is cooled by a small cryocooler that can remove only about 10 W, so the insulation around it has to be extremely good. Multilayer insulation (MLI), a stack of reflective foils and low-conductivity spacers in vacuum, is the standard choice. Its performance depends strongly on compression, vacuum level and construction, so it has to be measured.
For my thesis I designed and built an apparatus to measure the through-thickness thermal conductance of MLI, adapting the ASTM D5470 calorimeter-bar method to vacuum and cryogenic temperatures. It uses mirror-polished metal bars with embedded temperature sensors inside a high-vacuum chamber. The cold end was cooled first with liquid nitrogen and later with a cryocooler and thermal strap, and a pneumatic actuator applied the compression that the insulation would see in a spinning rotor.
The measurements showed the expected trends with the number of layers, with compression and with radiation shielding. They did not reach the very low conductance expected of high-performance MLI. To understand why, I modeled the apparatus analytically and with finite elements and carried out an uncertainty analysis. Radiation from the sides of the bars and the very small temperature gradients at low heat flux lead the method to overestimate conductance, which sets a practical measurement floor near 1 W/m²·K in this configuration. The thesis documents both what the method can measure and where it stops, and recommends alternatives for ultra-low conductance.
It was not the result we had hoped for, but it taught me how to design an experiment, how to work with vacuum and cryogenic hardware, and how to be honest about what a measurement can resolve.
Undergraduate research
- Turbine blade cooling (bachelor’s thesis, IIT Bombay, 2022–23). Heat transfer enhancement in pin-fin channels using rib turbulators, through simulations and infrared thermal imaging experiments.
- Buoyant jets in viscoplastic fluids (Université Laval, summer 2022). High-speed imaging and particle image velocimetry experiments, and machine learning models to predict jet characteristics. Two publications.
- Ventilation of enclosed spaces (IIT Bombay). CFD analysis of ventilation in high-occupancy rooms. Published in Resonance.
- Simulation of slender elastic structures (UCLA, 2021). Data-driven modeling for the discrete elastic rods algorithm, including hydrodynamic models of bacterial flagella.
Course projects
- Topology optimization of a heat sink for two-phase immersion cooling of chips.
- Thermal management of an electric vehicle battery pack with hybrid liquid cooling.