Shock Tube & Advanced Mixing Laboratory STAM
CV
 

Education

  • Ph.D, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2007
  • M.S., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2005
  • B.E., National Institute of Technology-Trichy, 2003

Background

Devesh Ranjan was named the Eugene C. Gwaltney, Jr. School Chair in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech and took over the role on January 1, 2022. He previously served as the Associate Chair for Research, and Ring Family Chair in the Woodruff School. He also holds a courtesy appointment in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering and serves as a co-director of the $100M Department of Defense-funded University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics (UCAH). At Georgia Tech, Ranjan has held several leadership positions including chairing ME’s Fluid Mechanics Research Area Group (2017 - 2018), serving as ME’s Associate Chair for Research (2019-present), and as co-chair of the “Hypersonics as a System” task-force, and serving as Interim Vice-President for Interdisciplinary Research (Feb 2021-June 2021). 

Ranjan joined the faculty at Georgia Tech in 2014. Before coming to Georgia Tech, he was a director’s research fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory (2008) and Morris E. Foster Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering department at Texas A&M University (2009-2014). He earned a bachelor's degree from the NIT-Trichy (India) in 2003, and master's and Ph.D. degrees from the UW-Madison in 2005 and 2007 respectively, all in mechanical engineering. 

Ranjan’s research focuses on the interdisciplinary area of power conversion, complex fluid flows involving shock and hydrodynamic instabilities, and the turbulent mixing of materials in extreme conditions, such as supersonic and hypersonic flows. Ranjan is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and has received numerous awards for his scientific contributions, including the DOE-Early Career Award (first GT recipient), the NSF CAREER Award, and the US AFOSR Young Investigator award. He was also named the J. Erskine Love Jr. Faculty Fellow in 2015. He was invited to participate in the National Academy of Engineering’s 2016 US Frontiers in Engineering Symposium. For his educational efforts and mentorship activity, he has received CATERPILLAR Teaching Excellence Award from College of Engineering at Texas A&M, as well as 2013 TAMU ASME Professor Mentorship Award from TAMU student chapter of the ASME. At Georgia Tech, Ranjan served as a Provost’s Teaching and Learning Fellow (PTLF) from 2018-2020, and was named 2021 Governor’s Teaching Fellow. He was also named Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Fellow for 2020-21.

Ranjan is currently part of a 10-member Technical Screening Committee of the NAE’s COVID-19 Call for Engineering Action taskforce, an initiative to help fight the coronavirus pandemic. He currently serves on the Editorial Board of Shock Waves and was a former Associate Editor for the ASME Journal of Fluids Engineering. 

 

International or National Awards

  • Fellow, American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)
  • Fellow, Governor’ Teaching Fellows Program 
  • US National Academy of Engineering Invitee to the 2019 Global Grand Challenges Summit in London, UK. [Summit hosted by Royal Academy of Engineering] 
  • George H. Markstein Best Paper Award, 2018 by Eastern States Section of Combustion Institute (ESSCI)
  • Department of Energy-Early Career Award, 2016
  • Invited participant to National Academy of Engineering’s 2016 US Frontiers of Engineering Symposium
  • US Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigator Award, 2013
  • National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, 2013
  • Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for Postdoctoral Research, August 2007 
  • Director’s Research Fellow, Los Alamos National Laboratory, 2008
  • Article selected as cover page in Journal of Fluid Mechanics-Vol. 594
  • Best Poster, International Conference on Advances in Fluid Mechanics, Bangalore, India, July 2003.
  • Best Student Contribution, 16th American Nuclear Society Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy, September 2004.

Institute or School Awards      

  • Inaugural Ring Family Chair, based on “sponsored research, scholarly publications, and student advising, 2021-2026.
  • Diversity and Inclusion Fellow, 2020-2021
  • 2020 Faces of Inclusive Excellence
  • Provost Emerging Leaders Program, 2018-2019
  • Provost Teaching and Learning Fellow, 2018-2020
  • J. Erskine Love Jr. Faculty Fellow, [(based on “sponsored research, scholarly publications, and student advising] (2015-2020)
  • Sigma Xi Georgia Tech Chapter, Best M.S. Thesis Award (for Mr. David Reilly in 2016)
  • Georgia Tech nominee to attend 2016 NAE-Frontiers in Engineering Education
  • Woodruff School Teaching Fellow, 2015
  • Texas A&M University Nominee for 2014 Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists (Category- Physical Sciences and Engineering)[Sole nominee from the Institute]
  • Morris E. Foster Faculty Fellow in Mechanical Engineering (Awarded by College of Engineering), 2013
  • 2013 Texas A&M ASME Professor Mentorship Award
  • Caterpillar Teaching Excellence Award 2012-2013 (Awarded by College of Engineering)
  • TEES Select Young Faculty Award, 2012-2013
  • Morris E. Foster Faculty Fellowship, Department of Mechanical Engineering, TAMU, 2010
  • TAMU Student Led Award for Teaching Excellence (SLATE), 2009

Representative Publications

  • M. Caccia, M. Tabandeh-Khorshid, G. Itskos, A. R. Strayer, A. S. Caldwell, S. Pidaparti, S. Singnisai, A. D. Rohskopf, A. M. Schroeder, D. Jarrahbashi, T. Kang, S. Sahoo, N. R. Kadasala, A. Marquez-Rossy, M. H. Anderson, E. Lara-Curzio, D. Ranjan, A. Henry & K. H. Sandhage, “Ceramic-metal composites for heat exchangers in concentrated solar power plants,”  Nature, Vol 562, Issue 7727, pg 406, (2018).
  • Katz, A., Aakre, S. R., Anderson, M. H., and Ranjan, D.,“Experimental investigation of pressure drop and heat transfer in high temperature supercritical CO2 and helium in a printed-circuit heat exchanger,” International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, Volume 171, pp 121089 (2021).
  • Lim, Chang Hyeon., Pathikonda, G., Johnston, S. R., and Ranjan, D., “Experimental investigation of supercritical carbon dioxide non-equilibrium condensation in a highly unsteady environment” Experimental Thermal and Fluid Sciences, Volume 127, pp 110417 (2021).
  • Fries, D, Ranjan, D., and Menon, S., “Turbulent Mixing and Trajectories of Jets in a Supersonic Crossflow with Different Injectants,” Journal of Fluid Mechanics, Vol. 911, pp. A45 1-40 (2021).
  • Musci, B., Petter, S., Pathikonda, G., Ochs, B., and Ranjan, D., “Supernova Hydrodynamics: A Lab-Scale Study of the Blast-Driven Instability Using high-Speed Flows,” The Astrophysical Journal, volume 896, number 2, May 2020.
  • Akula, B., Suchandra, P., Mikhaeil, M., and Ranjan, D., “Dynamics of unstably stratified free shear flows: an experimental investigation of coupled Kelvin–Helmholtz and Rayleigh–Taylor instability”, Journal of Fluid Mechanics, Vol. 816, pp. 619-660 (2017).
  • Mohaghar, M., Carter, J., Pathikonda, G., Ranjan, D., “The transition to turbulence in shock-driven mixing: effects of Mach number and initial conditions”, Journal of Fluid Mechanics, Vol. 871, pp. 595-635 (2019).
  • Mohaghar, M., Carter, J., Musci, B., Reilly, D., Mcfarland, J., and Ranjan, D., “Evaluation of turbulent mixing transition in a shock-driven variable-density flow”, Journal of Fluid Mechanics, Vol. 831, pp. 779-825 (2017).
  • Akula, B., and Ranjan, D., “Dynamics of buoyancy driven flows at moderately high Atwood numbers”, Journal of Fluid Mechanics, Vol. 795, pp. 313-355 (2016).
  • Ranjan, D., Oakley, J., and Bonazza, R., “Shock-Bubble Interactions,” Annual Rev. Fluid Mech., 43, pp117-140 (2011)
  • Mikhaeil, M., Suchandra, P., Ranjan, D., and Pathikonda, G.,“Simultaneous velocity and density measurements of fully developed Rayleigh-Taylor mixing,” Physical Review Fluids, Volume 6, Issue 7, pp 073902 (2021).
  • Pathikonda, G., Usta, M., Ahmad, M. C., Khan, I., Gillis, P., Dhodapkar, S., Jain, P., Ranjan, D., and Aidun, C. K., “Mixing behavior in a confined jet with disparate viscosity and implications for complex reactions,” Chemical Engineering Journal, volume 403, 1 Jan. 2021, 126300.
  • Yarrington, J. D., Bagepalli, M. V.,Pathikonda, G.,  Schrader, A., Zhang, Z. M., Ranjan, D., and Loutzenhiser, P. G., “Numerical analyses of high temperature dense, granular flows coupled to high temperature flow property measurements for solar thermal energy storage,” Solar Energy, Vol. 213, pp 350-360 (2021)
  • Ochs, B., Ranjan, R., Ranjan, D., and Menon, S., “Topology and Flame Speeds of Turbulent Premixed Flame Kernels in Supersonic Flows,” Combustion and Flame, Vol 210, pp. 83-99, (2019) .
  • Karimi, M., Ochs, B., Zefang. L., Ranjan, D., Wenting, S., “Measurement of methane autoignition delays in carbon dioxide and argon diluents at high pressure conditions”, Combustion and Flame, Vol 204, pp. 304-319, (2019).
  • McFarland, J. A., Reilly, D., Black, W., Greenough, J. A., and Ranjan, D., “Modal interactions between a large-wavelength inclined interface and small wave-length multimode perturbations in a Richtmyer-Meshkov Instability,” Physical Review E, Vol. 92, 013023 (2015).