Reno Reporter

Aditya Nair theorizes that the way to design better engineering systems is to have a complete understanding of how existing ones interact.

It’s a theory that makes sense to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), which recently awarded Nair with a five-year research grant.

“I want to emphasize that really understanding fundamental interactions between physical systems and taking advantage of them to build better technology is the key to scientific progress,” Nair, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Nevada, Reno said in a recent university release about the award.

One example that he might look at is wind turbines, where he hopes to show that understanding how a wind turbine interacts with wind and temperature fluctuations, is critical to coming up with improved systems.

The five-year research project, which began this summer, is being funded by a $749,034 Early Career Research Program grant from the DOE. The grant’s aim is to help engineers harness maximum performance through intelligent design, the release said.

The DOE Early Career Research program, now in its 13th year, focuses on providing assistance to outstanding researchers during critical early career years when many scientists do their most formative work. The recipients of the awards were chosen from a large pool of applicants from universities and national laboratories.

Nair’s project abstract says the research “will facilitate an accurate characterization of cross-physics sensitivities, automate the algorithmic selection process for high-performance computing, and enable energy-efficient functioning of multi-physics systems.”