Indranil Saha Dalal

Assistant Professor

Research Interest

  • Modeling and simulation of the dynamics of polymer chains in flow
  • Mesoscale and molecular dynamics simulations
  • Modeling and simulation of complex fluids
  • Flow induced effects in biomolecules

Education

  • B. Tech., Chemical Engineering, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, 2003
  • M.E., Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, 2005
  • M.S., Mathematics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2013
  • Ph.D., Chemical Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2013
  • Postdoctoral fellow, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2013-2014

Research Overview

Complex fluids like polymer solutions, melts etc. are characterized by relaxation motions at widely varying length and time scales, ranging over several orders of magnitudes. My research aims at a multi-scale analysis of the dynamics occurring at different length scales and their interplay with any imposed flow on the system. For this, I employ computational techniques like molecular dynamics (which provides information at the level of atoms and molecules) and Brownian dynamics ("Mesoscale" simulations that probe the behavior of groups of atoms, molecules). Using the fundamental information obtained from such simulations, we can, in principle, try to build constitutive models for such systems, which can be used with CFD to understand the non-newtonian effects produced by these complex fluids in flow.

Publications

  • P. Kumar, I. S. Dalal, Effects of chain resolution on the configurational and rheological predictions from Brownian dynamics simulations of an isolated polymer chain in flow, arxiv preprint arXiv:2208.04457 (2022).
  • P. Giri, K. Chandran, K. Muralidhar, I. S. Dalal, Effects of coupling of mass transport and blood viscosity models for microchannel flows, Journal of Non-Newtonian Fluid Mechanics, 302, 104754 (2022).
  • A. Goswami, I. S. Dalal, J. K. Singh, Universal Nucleation Behavior of Sheared Systems, Physical Review Letters, 126, 195702 (2021).
  • I.S. Dalal, P. Kumar, R. G. Larson, Accurate Closure for the Configuration Dynamics and Rheology of Dilute Polymer Chains in Arbitrary Flows, Macromolecules, 54, 6355 (2021).