Shri Jagjeet Singh Bindra (BT/CHE/1969), our illustrious alumnus and Institute fellow, made substantial contributions, both financially and intellectually towards the creation of the “Jeet Bindra Unit Operations and Innovation Lab”. Due to his diligence and vision, the chemical engineering department can now boast of a state-of-the-art laboratory.

The institute invited Mr. Bindra for the inauguration of the lab on its completion. Due to Covid-19 restrictions last year, Mr. Bindra could not personally attend the Institute Fellow Award ceremony on the Foundation Day. Hence, we presented him with Institute Fellow Award when he eventually visited the campus on 12th April 2022 and inaugurated the renovated lab of the chemical engineering department which has now been named as the Jeet Bindra Unit Operations & Innovation Lab.

Mr. Bindra has been a dynamic part of the unique technological ecosystem which has its roots at IIT Kanpur. We will always cherish his contributions and support toward the development of the department. We wish to thank him for his dedication and continuous support and care towards his alma mater.

Prof. Ashutosh Sharma is a visionary academician who has made some exceptional interdisciplinary contributions in nanosciences and nanotechnology fields.From 2015-2021, he served as the Secretary, Department of Science and Technology, Government of India. He has been elected as the President of Indian National Science Academy in 2022. He is also the Institute Chair Professor & Founding Coordinator of DST Thematic Unit of Excellence on Soft Nanofabrication and Chairman of Center for Environmental Science and Engineering at IIT Kanpur since 2006.

He is a recipient of the prestigious Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar award in engineering sciences for his "original pioneering contribution to the understanding of the behavior of thin films and other highly confined nanoscale systems."

Prof. Sharma received his B.Tech. in Chemical Engineering from IIT Kanpur in 1982. In 1983, he obtained his master's in the same subject from Pennsylvania State University and later joined the doctoral program at the State University of New York, Buffalo and obtained a Ph.D. under the supervision of Prof. Eli Ruckenstein in 1987.

For the next three years, he worked as a research scientist with the Department of Ophthalmology, School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, State University of New York. In 1991, he moved back to India and joined IIT Kanpur in the Department of Chemical Engineering.

Prof. Sharma's research contributions are highly interdisciplinary, spanning a wide range of nanotechnology areas; carbon-based nanocomposites and MEMS/NEMS in energy, health and environment; functional interfaces; micro/nano-mechanics of soft matter; nano-patterning and nanofabrication; colloid and interfacial engineering; biomaterials & bio surfaces; wetting, adhesion, and thin polymer films. He has made original pioneering contributions to the understanding of the behavior of thin films and other highly confined nanoscale systems. He has filed over 10 patents, given over 100 invited or keynote conference presentations and mentored a nanotechnology startup.

Ms. Vartika Shukla currently serves as the Chairperson and Managing Director (Technical) and Director (Finance) of Engineers India Ltd. (EIL). A graduate in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, Shukla joined EIL in 1988 and possesses consulting experience. She possesses more than 32 years of extensive technical and consulting experience across the hydrocarbon value chain and has led the company to the successful completion of many prestigious projects in Oil & Gas Refining, Petrochemical, Fertilizers sector both in India and overseas. She has been actively spearheading the company’s initiatives in new energy areas including Bio-fuels, Coal Gasification, Waste to Fuel & Hydrogen. She was also instrumental in forging several key Collaborative Partnerships for expansion of Technology Portfolio on EIL. She has been associated with the various functions of the organization during her vast career. As Director (Technical), she has steered the Process Design, Research & Development, and the entire Engineering functions of the company which is critical for project implementation. She has also been very closely associated with developing in-house competencies and strategizing for new business opportunities both in the core hydrocarbon sector and in diversified areas of operations. In an nutshell, Ms. Shukla has made immense contributions to the development of National Policies, especially in the areas of BioFuels and future road map for the refining and petrochemical sector.

Honoring her stellar contribution in the field of Chemical Engineering and Technology, IIT Kanpur conferred upon Ms.Vartika Shukla, the Distinguished Alumnus Award of 2021.

In a great honor for the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, Prof. Yogesh M Joshi from the Department of Chemical Engineering has been elected as one of the Fellows of the Society of Rheology, 2022. He is the first Indian to be selected for this prestigious honor.

The Society of Rheology Fellowship is a prestigious status that “status recognizes a history of distinguished scientific achievement, a significant technological accomplishment, and/or outstanding scholarship in the field of Rheology.” (The Society of Rheology). They also take into account ‘service to society’ as an important component and a minimum period of 8 years as member of the Society of Rheology. Annually, only 0.5% of the membership are eligible for the Fellowship.

Prof. Abhay Karandikar, Director, IIT Kanpur said, “Congratulations to Prof. Yogesh Joshi for being elected as one of the Fellows of the Society of Rheology for the year 2022. This is indeed a matter of great pride for the institution. This adds more value to the research and innovation ecosystem of IIT Kanpur, and would boost the spirit of everyone at the institute to continue striving for excellence in any science and technology field.”

Professor Yogesh M Joshi received his Bachelor of Engineering in Polymer Engineering from Pune University in 1996 and did his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 2001. After his doctoral and postdoctoral studies at National Chemical Laboratory, and the Benjamin Levich Institute, City College of New York, CUNY, respectively, he joined the Department of Chemical Engineering of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in 2004. He is currently the Pandit Girish & Sushma Rani Pathak Chair at IIT Kanpur.

Dr. Joshi’s primary rheological work encompasses soft glassy materials, the sol-gel transition, and the phase behavior of colloidal dispersions. Sol-gel process is a method for producing solid materials from small molecules. He is a senior editor of Langmuir, a peer-reviewed scientific journal that was established in 1985 and is published by the American Chemical Society, and also serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Rheology, Rheologica Acta, and Physics of Fluids.

Prof. Joshi has been awarded several key scientific awards. In 2015, he was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award in Engineering Sciences by the Government of India, and Academy excellence award of the Defense Research and Development Organization 2019. In 2016, he was elected as a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering and in 2017, as the Fellow of National Academy of Sciences, India. He actively consults with industry, including UPL Ltd. and Unilever Inc., regarding improving the flow behavior and rheological stability of their products.

Dr. Jayant K. Singh is a professor at IIT Kanpur in the Department of Chemical Engineering and also the head of Department of Chemical Engineering.

Prof. Singh did his B.Tech in chemical engineering from IIT Kanpur in 1997. He subsequently earned his M.S. degree in computer science and engineering, in 2002, and Ph.D. in chemical engineering, in 2004, in the area of molecular simulation from SUNY Buffalo, USA. Currently, he holds Poonam and Prabhu Goel Chair Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering.

Prof. Singh 's current research interest is in material modelling, machine learning, self-assembly, energy storage, wetting transition, selective adsorption and development of novel molecular simulations tool. He has provided significant insights into the phase equilibria and interfacial behaviour of bulk fluids and fluids confined in nanopores using statistical mechanics and molecular simulations. He also heads the Computational Nanoscience Laboratory & Laboratory for Interfacial Science at IIT Kanpur that works on understanding and development of new materials for energy, environment and health applications.

Prof. Singh's desire to innovate disruptive product has led him to found Prescience Insilico Pvt. Ltd, in 2019, for translating the methods and framework for the next generated accelerated drug and material discovery using physics-based methods.

He has been a Visiting Professor at University Darmstadt, Germany, Okayama University, Japan, University of Porto, Portugal, Technical University Darmstadt, Germany, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, NTU, Singapore.

ACS recognized Dr. Raju Kumar Gupta as one of the top 3% Highly Cited Authors from India in the year 2021, P K Kelkar Award, Fellow of Royal Society of Chemistry, Distinguished Alumnus Award of IIT Roorkee

This metric was calculated by obtaining the top 3% cited works in 2021 for all publications from India between Jan 1, 2019, to Dec 31, 2020.

Autotomy is a prominent escape strategy, employed by Lizards, Salamanders, Spiders, Mice and Worms, in which the animal self-amputates its body part to evade capture by its predator. The ease at which the animal sheds its limb depends on the nature of the joint that keeps it connected to the body. The joint is strong enough that the limb does not shed off during regular activity of the animal, yet it is weak to the extent that the animal doesn’t lose precious time, while struggling to release itself from the grasp of its predator. How does one meet this conflicting demand of strong attachment yet easy and rapid cleavage?

A recent article published in the Science journal1 addresses the above question in the context of caudal autotomy in lizards. The lizard tail consists of segments separated by distinct intravertebral fracture planes where bone does not deposit sufficiently. These planes remain weak where the tail remains overly vulnerable to fracture even in non-life-threatening situations. It has now understood that fracture of the tail is essentially mediated by that of the tissue that it is composed of. The tissue at these planes are not smooth and featureless but consist of hierarchical structural features with dimensions varying over hundreds of micrometers to tens of nanometers. The hierarchy helps in many ways: it gives flexibility to the proximal and distal parts to remain in intimate contact. It generates discontinuity at the contacting surface and spatial variation in modulus. When a normal load is exerted across the interface, splitting of the contact area leads to distribution of load which resists the separation. These features help in trapping and deflecting a crack multiple times, thereby resisting its propagation. As a result, simple stretching of the tail does not result in any failure at all. On the contrary, when a predator grabs the tail a little distance distal to a fracture plane, a slight act of bending of the animal causes stress singularity and consequent initiation of a crack from one edge. The crack propagates catastrophically leading to complete separation of the portion of the tail that is under seize. Thus, autotomy proves to be a successful survival tool in the natural world.

N. S. Baban, A. Orozaliev, S. Kirchhof, C. J. Stubbs, Y.-A. Song, Science 2022, 375(6582), 770-774.

It is common in hiking trails, in the winter months, to encounter frozen stagnant bodies of water (like ponds, lakes) while being required to cross flowing streams/rivers of liquid water. However, the impact of flow on the freezing nature of fluids is far from being understood.

For the first time, using a combination of molecular simulations and an analytical approach, a team of scientists from IIT Kanpur headed by Prof. Jayant K.Singh and Prof. Indranil Dalal of the Department of Chemical Engineering has examined the influence of flow on the rate of nucleations of several different liquids, such as water, colloids, and Lennard-Jones fluids.

Surprisingly, the study reveals an underlying universal behaviour of nucleation of fluids under shear, irrespective of the molecular nature and interactions. The theory presented here is capable of probing temperatures that are presently inaccessible to experiments.

A new anomaly for water was also discovered, which originates solely from the relationships between the transport properties at deep supercooling. This work provides a fundamental understanding of how supercooled liquids flow and crystallize and has far-reaching implications for future experiments and theoretical studies.

The study was published online in the prestigious journal physical review letters on 12 May 2021.

https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.195702

Fluid flows occuring in nature as well as in engineering applications can be broadly classified into laminar and turbulent flows. We can get an intuitive feel for these flow regimes from our day-to-day experience. If we open a water tap ever-so-gently, we will observe a thin thread of water that flows down; this is an example of laminar flow wherein the fluid particles move in a straight line in an orderly fashion. If we open the tap fully, we would see a very complicated water jet (with ill-defined boundaries) coming down from the tap. This is an example of turbulent flow, where the flow is chaotic and three-dimensional.

Understanding and prediction of the onset of turbulence is of immense practical interest in engineering applications. In Newtonian flows, the transition is driven by inertial forces, which is characterized by the famous dimensionless number called the Reynolds number, which measures the relative importance of inertial to viscous forces. Osborne Reynolds, in his famous experiments done in the 1880s, showed that the onset of turbulence in pipe flow of Newtonian fluids occurs at a Reynolds number of about 2000.

Fluids like water and air are called Newtonian fluids, and are characterized by their `stickiness’ or viscosity. If we add polymers (which are long-chained molecules) to water, the solution also acquires a `springiness’ or elasticity, in addition to the stickiness already present. Such fluids are termed viscoelastic.

In the flow of viscoelastic fluids, especially in geometries with curved streamlines (such as in flow in the gap between two discs, with one disc being rotated, or flow in the annular gap between two concentric cylinders), it is well known that a `hoop’ stress is present, and this drives an instability, even when the fluid inertial effects are negligible (i.e. Reynolds number is very small compared to unity). Such instabilities are dubbed `purely elastic’ since they do not require inertial forces to drive them. The complex chaotic flow state that emerges from this instability is called `elastic turblence’. The prevailing wisdom in the fluid mechanics literature has linked streamline curvature to purely elastic instabilties, and as a corollary, elastic instabilities are thought to be absent in rectilinear flows.

In a stark departure from this viewpoint, Khalid, Shankar and Subramanian have recently shown that purely elastic instabilities are present even in a rectilinear channel flow devoid of streamline curvature. This is the first ever demonstration of a purely elastic instability in a flow without streamline curvature. Further, they showed that the same instability continues to higher Reynolds number, and smoothly connects to the recently discovered elasto-inertial turbulent state, thereby discovering a continuous pathway between the elastic and elasto-inertial turbulent regimes.

In addition to its fundamental novelty, the discovery by Khalid et al. of an instability in the absence of inertia has implications in the enhancement of mixing in microfluidic devices where inertial effects are typically negligible.