About the Team

Dr. Abhilash Sharma Somayajula

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ocean Engineering at IIT Madras since 2019. I currently teach 3rd year (junior level) undergraduate courses on ship structural analysis and on maneuvering and control of marine vehicles. Before joining IIT Madras, I worked as a Research Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University where I was involved with the freshman engineering program. I graduated with a Bachelors and Masters in Ocean Engineering and Naval Architecture from IIT Kharagpur. I earned my PhD in ocean engineering from Texas A&M University. Recently, I also earned a Micro Masters on Robotics from University of Pennsylvania. My research interests include hydrodynamics, fluid structure interaction, application of artificial intelligence for marine systems and marine autonomous vessels. More details about my research and my research group can be found at my website below.

HydRA, short for 'Hydrodynamic Response Analysis' is a code that is being developed within my research group at IIT Madras to simulate linear and nonlinear dynamics of marine and offshore structures in the ocean. The idea behind the development of this code is twofold. On one hand, the code will be used extensively for research purposes and will be constantly updated based on the latest research being performed at our group. At the same time, the web application is being provided for free to allow students or professionals in the industry to simulate fluid structure interactions and visualize the results without the need to depend on a commercial software that involves a steep learning curve. Futhermore, the user need not have a high end computer to run simulations as the computations are performed on our servers. As the software is being primarily developed by undergraduate students and with an intent to make it easy for other undergraduate students to use it, the web application is structured in such a way that minimal effort is needed to start using this tool.

Arundathi Chandrasekharan

I am Arundathi Chandrasekharan and I am currently doing my 4th year Dual Degree (B.Tech. in Naval Architecture Ocean Engineering & Inter Disciplinary M.Tech. in Computational Engineering) at IIT Madras. My main interest is application of CFD(Computational Fluid Dynamics) in marine engineering and I want to learn more about computational biology.

I worked on the SIMDYN project under the guidance of Dr. Abhilash during my summer break between my 3rd and 4th year. I programmed the numerical computation of the impulse response function (or retardation function) from the added mass and radiation damping provided from a frequency domain 3D panel method program. I used the calculated impulse response functions to compute the radiation force experienced by a vessel while it is experiencing dynamic response in a seaway. The process was very interesting and it has helped me improve my understanding of both ship dynamics and web application development

Aswin Vijay

I am Aswin Vijay, a 4th year Dual Degree undergraduate in Naval Architecture and Robotics. My research interests are in Robotics, Autonomous Control, and AI. I am also a senior member of Team Anveshak IITM, who specializes in making Mars Rovers.

My projects include being Lead of Robotic Manipulator module at Team Anveshak, control of autonomous differential drive robots, and currently, the development of a Marine Hydrodynamic Software program for computing Multibody Wave Interaction on ships in Non-Linear time domain.

During this internship under the guidance of Dr. Abhilash, I was in charge of calculating various grid properties for initializing simulation variables like centroids, normals, areas, etc. I also wrote a program to slice the grid mesh at the waterline to generate a new underwater mesh profile. The Froude Krylov and Hydrostatic interactions acting on the vessel are computed depending on the linearity and non-linearity of the respective forces the user wants. The program was then optimized to run through the time steps faster by reducing the complexity of computations for the linear cases. The internship helped me appreciate the application of the theory I learnt in my course on maneuvering and control and allowed me to create a software that can simulate wave body interactions. The internship also introduced me to various new avenues of programming in both python and Web Development.

Manoranjan

I am Manoranjan, pursuing Dual Degree in Naval Architecture & Ocean Engineering. My interests are in the domain of Robotics & Deep Learning in marine applications. I have worked with Robot Operating System (ROS) in making autonomous robots.

The project that I took part under the guidance of Professor Abhilash Somyajula involved creating a custom simulation environment for hydrodynamic analysis of multiple marine bodies in open sea at various conditions. This simulation environment can be used for future academic and research projects in the department. I was responsible for creating the necessary wave environment for the simulation and also for the calculation of scattering forces experienced by the marine bodies. These were challenging and engaging tasks as it involved a lot of factors to be taken into consideration. The wave simulation is developed to make sure users can test a wide category of waves ranging from regular waves to irregular spectral waves to study the response. The irregular spectral waves are developed to follow rayleigh distribution to match real life scenarios. Scattering forces are calculated from the input of a frequency domain program.