Sunil Anandatheertha

I believe knowledge is that tool in need of the right effort to make things work. It grows from an intense strive to fly higher and dive deeper into the abyss of nature to make the less known as more known, using the tools that we make in this journey.

As a PhD scholar, I contributed to the materials science community through my research findings and open source software. I used a variety of experimental and numerical techniques for research. I am experienced at using EBSD for texture and grain structure data acquisition across nm to mm length scales; neutron transmission for residual stress analysis in laser shock peened aluminium alloys; SEM; EDS for alloy constitution determination; XRD for residual stress calculations, fatigue testing to test residual stress stability, for which I have designed custom stress rigs; optical microscopy for basic grain structure observation; white light interferometry for surface roughness determination and tensile testing for mechancial behaviour characterization. Successfully defended my thesis defence on 21st July 2021.

I am actively looking for post-doctoral fellowship in computational material science (Crystal Plasticity FEA, Molecular dynamics, Monte-Carlo simulation, Phase-Field simulation), multi-scale material characterization of metallic structures and residual stress stability. I am keen on implementing Phase-Field simulations to study grain growth in high entropy alloys and additively manufactured titanium alloys; and discerte dilocation dynamics and molecular dynamics as tools to understand the atomistic nature of very high strain rate plastic deformation in aerospace grade metallic structures, where structural integrity is a key factor for safe operatiopn.

My overall research activities are focused on the following:

1. Multi-scale effects of plastic deformation on the crystallographic texture and grain structure of aerospace aluminium alloys
2. Effect of texture and grain structure on the mechanical stability of beneficial compressive residual stresses in fatigue loading conditions
3. Simulation of multi-phase grain growth in metallic structures using Monte-Carlo simulations
4. Static and kinematic temporal space partitioning
5. Molecular mechanics based finite element analysis of carbon nanotubes and graphenes using custom developed codes and proprietory softwares.

I have written a laboratory manual for MATLAB and am currently also investing time authoring a book on MATLAB and Python.

I actively contribute to two open source GitHub software repositories (1) PXO and (2) ABAPYMAT. Both of these are documented with wikis. PXO is short for Poly-Xtal operations and you are in PXO wiki, you are now getting to know it. ABAPYMAT is short for ABAQUS-PYTHON-MATLAB. PXO is written primarily in MATLAB to enable the generation, analysis and data export of complex crystalline grain structures presenting spatial gradients of texture information and grain statistics. ABAPYMAT is primarily a collection of Python scripts and MATLAB codes to enable the crystal plasticity based finite element simulation in ABAQUS on complex grain structures, which are parametric by nature.

Besides the technical work, I love to play music on my instruments and spend happy time with my family. Here are some of the links:

1. LinkedIn
2. YouTube channel: Education, Karnatic classical music and spirituality
3. Wordpress blog