Dr. Rajat Mittal
Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering
John Hopkins University
Friday, Sep. 18th at 3:00pm
WEB L105
ABSTRACT: Advances in computing power, numerical algorithms, and data-enabled methodologies are transforming our ability to interrogate the flow physics of complex biological systems. A particularly impressive example of this is the human heart – a pump honed by evolution to deliver extraordinary performance. Over a human lifetime, the heart beats more than three billion times and moves a volume of blood equivalent to sixty Olympic swimming pools. Each cardiac cycle reflects a tightly orchestrated interaction among hemodynamics, electrophysiology, muscle mechanics, valve dynamics, acoustics, and biochemical processes. Equally remarkable are natural strategies for locomotion. Fish leverage flexible bodies and fins to harvest energy from unsteady vortices, achieving levels of propulsive efficiency that continue to elude engineered systems. Historically, our understanding of these phenomena was constrained by the limitations of our tools. Today, however, high-fidelity computational methods are granting unprecedented access to the coupled physics that govern living systems. In this talk, I will highlight how sharp-interface immersed boundary techniques – combined with large-scale HPC simulations – are enabling breakthroughs across multiple domains: from the chemo-fluidics driving thrombus formation in the heart and the vortex–sound interactions produced by flying insects, to the hydrodynamic benefits exploited by fish swimming in schools, and the novel propulsion concepts that are inspired by this. These examples illustrate how modern computational fluid dynamics is opening new frontiers at the nexus of physics, biology, and engineering.
BIO: Rajat Mittal is Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University with a secondary appointment in the School of Medicine. He received the B. Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur in 1989, the M.S degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Florida, and the Ph.D. degree in Applied Mechanics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1995. Mittal’s academic journey includes postdoctoral research at the Center for Turbulence Research at Stanford University, where he focused on large-eddy simulation. He began his teaching career at the University of Florida in 1996, and from 2001 to 2009, he was a faculty member at George Washington University. Since 2009, he has been a professor at Johns Hopkins University. His research interests include computational fluid dynamics, vortex-dominated flows, biomedical engineering, biological fluid dynamics, fluid-structure interaction, and flow control. He is the recipient of the 1996 Francois Frenkiel and the 2022 Stanley Corrsin Awards from the Division of Fluid Dynamics of the American Physical Society (APS), and the 2006 Lewis Moody as well as 2021 Freeman Scholar Awards from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). He is a Fellow of ASME, the American Physical Society (APS), AAAS, and AIMBE, and an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He is an associate editor of the Journal of Computational Physics, Frontiers of Computational Physiology and Medicine, and serves on the editorial boards of the International Journal for Numerical Methods in Biomedical Engineering and Physics of Fluids.