About Me

About Me

I work on keeping seismic energy out of structures rather than asking structures to endure it. That is a concise way of describing a path that began with concrete materials, moved through nonlinear modelling and large-scale steel testing, and now sits at the heart of the design of energy-dissipating devices.

I came to it through Puducherry Technological University. My B.Tech in Civil Engineering culminated in a thesis on the bond strength of geopolymer concrete, in which I examined how the source of the fly ash affects the bond with reinforcement, which was later published in Materials Today: Proceedings and remains my most-cited paper. My M.Tech in Structural Engineering, under the same supervisor, shifted to nonlinear finite element analysis of tension stiffening in reinforced concrete beams: the part of the response that only appears after cracking and that no linear model will capture. Between them, those two projects set the pattern I have followed since. Material behaviour is decided in the laboratory, and a numerical model is worth only as much as the experiment it can reproduce.

My PhD at IIT Madras in the Department of Ocean Engineering focused on coped beams in offshore topsides. Coping the beam is what allows a cluster of service lines, water mains, fire hydrants, power and telecommunications cables to pass through the structure, but it leaves a re-entrant corner where stress concentrates, and that cope corner is where the member gives way. I proposed stiffening it with a functionally graded material stiffener fabricated by wire arc additive manufacturing from carbon-manganese steel graded to Stellite 6, achieving an ultimate tensile strength of 720 MPa. The beams were tested to failure in the structures laboratory and under drop-weight impact from heights of one to ten metres, with strain gauges and digital image correlation tracking the full displacement field at the cope, and finite element models validated against every one of those series. The FGM stiffener measurably reduced strain and displacement in the cope region. That work is the subject of my first granted patent.

At the University of Naples Federico II, I joined the Department of Structures for Engineering and Architecture as a postdoctoral researcher, working on the PRIN 2022 PNRR project on eco-friendly seismic protection for underground structures, funded by the European Union - NextGenerationEU. The scale changed: instead of protecting a member, the question was how to protect a tunnel. Naples also gave me the constitutive and hysteretic modelling I had been missing, and a year of advanced training with DIST, UC Berkeley and EUCENTRE in structural control, seismic isolation, random vibration, soil-structure interaction and the numerical treatment of hysteretic systems. By the end of it, my interest had shifted from how a member fails to what can be placed in the load path to prevent failure.

That is what I work on now, as an independent researcher: a family of energy-dissipating dampers - hysteretic, wire-rope, granular and viscoelastic - taken from concept through constitutive model to filed intellectual property. Four Indian patent applications have resulted from this work, one of which has been granted. One of my proposals was awarded a Seal of Excellence by the European Commission under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, and I am preparing a fellowship as well. I design devices rather than only analyse them, and that shapes what I count as a finished piece of work. A damper must be manufacturable, installable, and tunable on-site, and its model remains provisional until test data has been run on it. I work across IS 1893, ASCE 7 and Eurocode 8, which I find useful rather than tedious. A device meant for practice has to satisfy a code somewhere, and the three of them ask different questions of the same design.

I enjoy teaching, and I have learned and assisted on Nonlinear Dynamics and Vibration Control at Naples, and on Advanced Steel Design, Computer Methods of Structural Analysis, Dynamics of Ocean Structures, and Offshore Structures under Special Loads at IIT Madras. Structural dynamics is nearly always taught through its equations, and students encounter damping as a coefficient long before they encounter it as an object someone has to design, fabricate, and bolt into place. I would rather teach it the other way round, with laboratory work and real devices as close to the front as the syllabus allows.