Dr. Sathesh Mariappan is currently serving as an Associate Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. He completed his Bachelors at Madras Institute of Technology, 2007 (University First Rank) and obtained his Ph.D. from Indian Institute of Technology Madras, 2012, both in Aerospace Engineering. Before joining IIT Kanpur, he worked in the German Aerospace Center, Goettingen as a Humboldt Post Doctoral fellow. He is a recipient of Young Engineer Awards from the Indian National Academy of Engineering and Institution of Engineers. He is also recognized internationally through the Humboldt Fellowship and International Exchanges award (co-applicant) from The Royal Society – London. His research focuses on understanding and mitigating combustion-driven oscillations in gas turbine engines.
During the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, Dr. Mariappan will specialize in applying physics informed neural network (PINN): a machine learning method, to study combustion driven oscillations in combustors of gas turbine engines. PINN is an emerging tool, having the striking advantage to synergize experimental data and physics-based models. This synergy brings a new understanding of flame-flow interactions and helps develop more accurate hybrid models, which serve for instability prognosis and mitigation. This alternative (superior) hybrid framework will model combustor dynamics more accurately (than models derived purely from theory or experiments), even in practical systems, leading to efficient/robust control of oscillations.