Dr Gandham Phanikumar obtained his B.Tech in Metallurgical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 1996. He received his doctoral degree from the Faculty of Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, in 2002. He did his post-doctoral research at the German Aerospace Centre, Cologne, Germany, where he was an Alexander von Humboldt scholar. He returned to his alma mater in 2005. Since 2015 he has been a full Professor with the Department. He has developed the electromagnetic levitation facility to undercool metallic alloys, and the studies in his group on undercooling - growth rate correlations for Heusler alloys and high entropy alloys are the first of their kind in the open literature. He has developed program codes that use the Phase-Field approach to simulate microstructure evolution during solidification taking advantage of GPU computing using MPI + OpenCL platforms. These are recently released in the public domain on GitHub as "MicroSim", collaboratively developed by a consortium of research groups across six organizations under a project from the National Supercomputing Mission. He has over 100 lectures made public under NPTEL for courses on "Analysis and Modeling of Welding", "Transport Phenomena in Materials", "Introduction to Research", as well as "System Commands" as part of the online B.Sc. degree in Programming and Data Science. He is leading the efforts in Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME).
Phase field modelling of solidification
Solidification of undercooled melts
Thermal field and distortion analysis during welding
Laser based additive manufacturing
Integrated computational materials engineering
2015 - till date
2010 - 2015
2005 - 2010
Professor
Associate Professor
Assistant Professor
2019-Metallurgist of the Year award from the Ministry of Steel and Mines.
2007-SAFRAN -French Embassy special prize
2005-Young Metallurgist of the year from the Ministry of Steel, Govt. of India
2003 & 2005-Research fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany