Suhas V. Patankar (born 22 February 1941) is an Indian mechanical engineer. He is a pioneer in the field of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and Finite volume method. He is currently a Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota. He is also president of Innovative Research, Inc. Patankar was born in Pune, Maharashtra, India.
Patankar received his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering in 1962 from the College of Engineering, Pune, which is affiliated to the University of Pune and his Master of Technology degree in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 1964. In 1967 he received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the Imperial College, University of London.
Dr. Suhas V. Patankar is a Professor Emeritus in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Minnesota, where he worked for 25 years (from 1975-2000). He is also the President of Innovative Research, Inc. He has done significant research in the field of computational fluid dynamics. Dr. Patankar has authored or co-authored four books, published over 150 papers, advised 35 completed Ph.D. theses, and lectured extensively in the USA and abroad.
Dr. Patankar received his Ph. D. from Imperial College, London. Prior to working at the University of Minnesota, he held teaching and research positions at IIT, Kanpur, Imperial College, and University of Waterloo. For excellence in teaching, he received the 1983 George Taylor Distinguished Teaching Award and the 1989-90 Morse-Alumni Award for Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Education. For his research contributions to computational heat transfer, he was given the 1991 ASME Heat Transfer Memorial Award and the 1997 Classic Paper Award. He was awarded the 2008 Max Jakob Award, which is considered to be the highest international honor in the field of heat transfer. In 2015, an International Conference on Computational Heat Transfer (CHT-15) held at Rutgers University in New Jersey was dedicated to Professor Patankar.
Dr. Patankar’s widespread influence on research and engineering education has been recognized in many ways. In 2007, the Editors of the International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer wrote, “There is no person who has made a more profound and enduring impact on the theory and practice of numerical simulation in mechanical engineering than Professor Patankar.”
Patankar’s most important contribution to the field of CFD is the SIMPLE algorithm that he developed along with his colleagues at Imperial College. Patankar is the author of a book in computational fluid dynamics titled Numerical Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow which was first published in 1980. This book has since been considered one of the groundbreaking contributions to computational fluid dynamics due to its emphasis on physical understanding and insight into the fluid flow and heat transfer phenomena. He is also one of the most cited authors in science and engineering.
In the early-1960s, the group led by Spalding had just started out in CFD, focusing on the numerical solution of boundary layer flows. These are the thin regions which develop as flow passes over a solid surface. They can be approximated by partial differential equations which are classified as ‘parabolic’ in the main flow direction, i.e. they show a ‘one-way’ behaviour along the coordinate aligned with the
main flow direction. “A one-way coordinate is such that conditions at a given location in that coordinate are influenced by changes in conditions on only one-side of that location……Even a space coordinate can very nearly become one-way under the action of fluid flow. If there is a strong unidirectional flow in the coordinate direction, then significant influences travel only from upstream to downstream.
The conditions at a point are then affected largely by the upstream conditions and very little by the downstream ones. The one-way nature of a space coordinate is an approximation. It is true that convection is a one-way process, but diffusion (which is always present) has two-way influences. However, when the flow rate is large, convection overpowers diffusion and thus makes the space coordinate nearly one-way.”
Patankar’s description allows us to easily understand the mathematical behaviour of the governing equations for boundary layer flows. This behaviour allows for significant simplifications in the numerical
solution of such flows. The solution can simply proceed from known initial conditions at a given upstream location, being ‘marched’ downstream and, at any given time, the only flow conditions which need to be stored are those at the current and next downstream location. This minimises both computer storage
and run time, which was of utmost importance with the precious, but limited, hardware available in the
1960s. Patankar successfully developed and applied such methods in his PhD on heat and mass transfer in boundary layers , later publishing the computational method and code – known as GENMIX – in a book with Spalding.
GENMIX came to be widely used. But many flows of engineering interest are governed by equations which are ‘elliptic’, rather than parabolic, i.e. they show a two-way coordinate behaviour : “A two-way coordinate is such that the conditions at a given location in that coordinate are influenced by changes in conditions on either side of that location.”
In an elliptic equation, information can propagate freely by convection and diffusion in each of the coordinate directions, i.e. both downstream and upstream. There are no limited regions of influence. In a flow which is modelled as elliptic, this means that the influence of a change in conditions such as a local increase in pressure is felt everywhere. The numerical ‘marching’ methods used in the solution of parabolic flows are no longer applicable, as the solution must instead be obtained for all points in the flow simultaneously.
After completing his PhD, Patankar worked as an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Technology,
Kanpur, from 1967 to 1970. In this period, Spalding’s group became increasingly engaged in the numerical solution of elliptic flow problems. They had been successful in solving two-dimensional flows,
but the methods* they were using could not obviously be extended to three-dimensional flows. To
understand some of the difficulties in the solution of elliptic equations for fluid flow, we must now turn
our attention to the governing equations.