Education Profile

  • Ph.D., Rutgers University, 1994
  • B. Tech., Indian Institute of Technology, 1986

Ravi Samtaney is presently an associate professor in Mechanical Engineering (Physical Science and Engineering Division) with a joint appointment in Applied Mathematics (Mathematical and Computational Sciences and Engineering) at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Prior to KAUST, he was a Research Physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Princeton University. He has also held research positions at NASA Ames Research Center and the California Institute of Technology. His research is at the intersection of applied mathematics, physics, and engineering, from fundamental processes in fluid mechanics (shocks, turbulence, etc.) and plasmas to numerical methods and large-scale computing (adaptive meshing, nonlinear PDE solvers, etc.). He obtained his Ph.D. under the supervision of Professor Norman Zabusky from Rutgers University in 1994.

Research Interests

  • Physics:
    • Fluid dynamics
    • Plasma physics.
  • Computational:
    • Numerical methods,
    • High-Performance Computing.
  • Topics:
    • Large-eddy simulation
    • wall-bounded turbulence
    • magnetohydrodynamics
    • two-fluid plasma simulation
    • hydrodynamic instabilities
    • discrete exterior calculus.

Selected Publications

Bakhsh, A., & Samtaney, R. (2019). Incompressible models of magnetohydrodynamic Richtmyer-Meshkov instability in cylindrical geometry. Physical Review Fluids, 4(6). https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevfluids.4.063906
Gao, W., Zhang, W., Cheng, W., & Samtaney, R. (2019). Wall-modelled large-eddy simulation of turbulent flow past airfoils. Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 873, 174–210. https://doi.org/10.1017/jfm.2019.360
Mostert, W., Pullin, D. I., Samtaney, R., & Wheatley, V. (2018). Spontaneous singularity formation in converging cylindrical shock waves. Physical Review Fluids, 3(7). https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevfluids.3.071401
Cheng, W., Pullin, D. I., & Samtaney, R. (2018). Large-eddy simulation of flow over a rotating cylinder: the lift crisis at. Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 855, 371–407. https://doi.org/10.1017/jfm.2018.644
Shen, N., Li, Y., Pullin, D. I., Samtaney, R., & Wheatley, V. (2018). On the magnetohydrodynamic limits of the ideal two-fluid plasma equations. Physics of Plasmas, 25(12), 122113. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5067387
Mohamed, M. S., Hirani, A. N., & Samtaney, R. (2016). Discrete exterior calculus discretization of incompressible Navier–Stokes equations over surface simplicial meshes. Journal of Computational Physics, 312, 175–191. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcp.2016.02.028