Atharva Modi

B.E. Mechanical Engineering – Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India (2022)

Biography

Atharva is from Maharashtra, India. He graduated with his Bachelors from BITS Pilani in 2022 and joined the Ewoldt Research Group in Fall 2023 for his PhD. In his undergrad, he worked on numerical modeling of rarefied fluid flows, multiphase flows and fluid-structure interactions. He also worked for a while at IIT Bombay on thermohaline fluid dynamics simulations of ice-melting in oceans.

Research Interests

He is working on uncertainty quantification of time-temperature-stress superposition (tTS) of viscoelastic fluids. These are materials that behave like a solid for motions with short time scales and like a fluid on longer time scales. These materials are usually studied with oscillatory shear experiments across a range of frequencies and these “frequency sweeps” have an interesting self-similar nature with respect to temperature. Hence, these curves can be superposed to form a tTS master curve, which is very useful for material behavior predictions. This mastercurve construction is complicated by the thermo-rheological complexity of the material and the uncertainty stemming from experimental measurements. Hence, the quantification of these non-ideal behaviors is essential to predict material behaviors in extreme conditions that are not experimentally accessible but also reducing the necessity (hence, cost) of repeat experiments overall.