Shock dynamics · Compressible flows · HPC & GPU computing
Akhil S. Pillai
PhD Scholar, Department of Aerospace Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.
I work on what happens when a shock wave meets something that can bend, break, or absorb it — how the wave loads a structure, and how the structure answers back into the flow. Before Bombay I was a Project Associate at IIT Madras, running direct numerical simulations of three-dimensional air–water flow past a circular cylinder with an in-house Fortran 90 solver: HLLC fluxes, MPI domain decomposition, OpenACC offload with one GPU per rank, and meshes of 8–30 million cells on PARAM Shakti and A100 nodes.
News
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Jul 2026
Joined the Department of Aerospace Engineering at IIT Bombay as a PhD scholar, working on shock wave interaction with structures and materials.
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Jul 2025
Joined Prof. A. Sameen’s group at IIT Madras as a Project Associate, continuing DNS of turbulent air–water flow past a cylinder on PARAM Shakti.
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Apr 2025
Completed my B.Tech thesis, Numerical simulation of flow over a bluff body using a compressible multifluid six-equation formulation, carried out at IIT Madras.
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May 2024
Selected for the IIT Madras Summer Fellowship — built CNN and PINN models in PyTorch to predict aerodynamic coefficients from airfoil geometry.
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Jun 2023
Internship at Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, Bengaluru, with exposure to the LCA Tejas production line.
Selected research
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2026–
Shock wave interaction with structures and materials — doctoral research at IIT Bombay.
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2025–26
DNS of compressible gas–droplet flow past a circular cylinder — six-equation two-fluid model, ~11× GPU speedup, meshes to 28M cells.
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2024–25
A compressible multifluid solver for gas–liquid flow past a bluff body — B.Tech thesis, carried out at IIT Madras.
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2024
Machine-learning surrogates for aerodynamic prediction — CNNs trained on XFoil data to predict lift and drag from airfoil geometry.