Subrata Bhattacharjee
Professor, San Diego State University

Professor Bhattacharjee earned a B.Tech. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in 1983 and his Ph.D. from Washington State University, Pullman, USA in 1988 (Advisor: Prof. William Grosshandler). After two years of post-doctoral work with Prof. Robert Altenkirch on a NASA project, he joined San Diego State University in 1991 and currently holds Professorship in Mechanical Engineering Department and Adjunct Professorship in Computer Science Department.

Professor Bhattacharjee has been actively involved in research in radiation heat transfer, combustion and computational thermodynamics, and development of software for educational purposes. For his dissertation, he developed a modified two-flux method (Effective Angle Method) for calculating radiative source term and used this model to study two-way coupling between radiation and fluid dynamics in a laminar diffusion flame. Working on a project on jet flow in boundary layers, he came upon a new non-dimensional group that compares a known pressure drop with viscous forces. This number has been used in the literature in connection with electronic cooling and has recently been included in textbooks. During his post-doctoral study, Dr. Bhattacharjee, investigated the mechanism of flame spread over solid fuels in a microgravity environment. His work with Prof. Altenkirch helped establish the dominance of radiation heat transfer in near quiescent environment. Subsequently, Dr. Bhattacharjee was co-PI and PI of several projects funded by NASA. Some of his contributions included: 1. Discovery of the phenomenon that flame over thick fuel bed in a quiescent microgravity environment self-extinguishes irrespective of the oxygen level; 2. Development of a formula for a critical thickness that renders a fuel thick in such an environment; 3. Development of two formulas for flame spread rate – one in the thin limit and one in the thick limit – which are the only flame spread formulas ever developed in the microgravity regime, the counterpart of de Ris’ flame spread formula in the thermal regime. Several of his experiments on flame spread over solid fuels have been conducted aboard NASA's Sounding Rockets, Space Shuttles, and Russia's Mir Space Station. Dr. Bhattacharjee also developed an international research program and collaborates with researchers from Gifu University, Japan, to study flame dynamics.

Supported by NSF, Dr. Bhattacharjee is currently developing a novel cyber infrastructure for multi-scale approach to thermodynamic data and chemical equilibrium services. Users can now plug in these services and ‘outsource’ the data used in their computer programs. By simply altering key words such as NASA, NIST, or AB-INITIO, for example, they can change the source of data used in their research applications. Likewise, equilibrium calculations can be integrated into any CFD code written in FORTRAN, MATLAB, or any other language through this type of ‘outsourcing’ or Web Services. The equilibrium program developed by Dr. Bhattacharjee’s group is equally powerful as NASA’s CEA and yet more robust and offers the built-in parallel architecture of Web Services.

Prof. Bhattacharjee’s passion for making thermodynamics easier to master led to the development of a webware (a web based software) called TEST, the Expert System for thermodynamics (www.thremofluids.net), regularly accessed by a huge number of students, professionals and educators from around the world (just last year about 5000 new users including 500 educators registered to use the site). TEST has been translated to Spanish and Japanese and 120 educational institutions currently hold site license to use TEST in their campuses. Several articles and one book have been written about the use of TEST in thermodynamic education. Unsolicited comments on how educators are finding this webware useful come every week from different corners of the world. Prof. Bhattacharjee has just finished writing a manuscript (to be published by Prentice Hall in Jan 2010) for a textbook on engineering thermodynamics. The book breaks away from the traditional spiral approach by using what he calls a layered approach where concepts such as entropy and exergy are introduced early (in chapter 1) and progressively refined in subsequent chapters. TEST is integrated so that students can use it as a numerical laboratory, verify manual solutions, and pursue what-if scenarios.