Guest Lecturer (Sept-Nov 2021)

Foundation of Modelling and Simulation

Metallurgical and Materials Engineering Department, VNIT, Nagpur

In past couple of years, I have realized that undergraduate students in materials engineering programs at many institutions (including National Institute of Technology, NITs) in India have a very poor exposure to computation and its application in their field. Hence, in this semester, I designed a foundational course in modelling and simulation for metallurgical and materials engineering students. I introduced this 16-hour lecture series to UG and PG students at VNIT, Nagpur. The aim was to introduce the students to computation and its applications in materials engineering. The course consisted of nine hours of theory lectures and seven hours of Python coding tutorials to simulate the concepts taught in theory lectures.

15 students from undergraduate and postgraduate programs and a faculty from metallurgical and materials engineering department at Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology (VNIT), Nagpur regularly followed the lecture series.

Here is a brief outline of the course:

• Introduction and applications for materials engineers (1 hour)
• Ordinary and Partial Differential Equations and their physical significance through examples (1 hour)
• Steady-state heat transfer in 1D (2 hours)
• Tutorial on Python basics (2 hours)
• Tutorial on simulating steady-state heat conduction in 1D (2 hours)
• Steady-state heat transfer in 2D (2 hours)
• Tutorial on simulating steady-state heat transfer in 2D (2 hours)
• Transient heat transfer problems in 1D and Python tutorial (2 hours)
• Applications through commercial and open-source software packages (2 hour)

This course has prepared them to explore the field by themselves and take up any advanced course in computation, modelling and simulation. It has also improved their job-prospects as many industries prefer candidates with computational background over those who don’t.