Research Internship Experience at Purdue University

 

- Rishikesh Shete

INTRODUCTION & MOTIVATION

Hey! I am Rishikesh Shete, a fourth-year Chemical Engineering Undergrad. Aside from my academically inclined life, I also love taking photographs, playing chess with my peers whenever I can and a cup of good coffee.

I was deeply fascinated by how the fields of mathematics and science explain the complex phenomena of this world with ease this prompted me to take engineering in the first place.

Chemical Engineering study and the overall syllabus at IIT Bombay is primarily streamlined and focuses on the RnD aspects of the field. As a sophomore I really wished to learn about its application to develop my understanding further in the field. So, I perceived to opt for a project in the Fluid Mechanics Lab of our department under Prof. Partha Goswami. This project proved to be a crucial aspect of learning for me and also the fact that I completed it with due diligence. It helped me to get ample amount of lab experience plus I used my academic knowledge coupled with the use of softwares like MATLAB to solve problems in Fluid Dynamics.

After this project I decided to be a part of Course on Wheels which is a fabulous initiative taken up by Prof Sanjay Mahajani. This course covered all major aspects of our field and we get an opportunity to see them applied in the chemical industry. Again, increasing my interest to pursue a research-based internship.

In my third- year I decided that it was time to explore internship opportunities overseas. Purdue University being one of the top universities in my areas of interest was an obvious choice on my list.

SELECTION PROCEDURE

Purdue University made the selection of its PURE (Purdue Undergraduate Research Experience) students primarily based upon the Statement of Interest which is required to understand your motivation for research, then your resume (which should include your past research experience in an easy to understand manner )and lastly there was a CPI cut-off of 7.5.

Before applying to Purdue, I had also done apping and applied to many research universities through sending emails to a lot of professors but as it usually occurs in this scenario, I found my luck at none.

WORK EXPERIENCE

I am working under the guidance of Prof. Shripad Revankar who is the director of the Multi-Phase and Fuel Cell Research Lab (MFCRL) in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at Purdue University. I am a part of this lab, though not physically present due to the CoVID-19 pandemic.

My main work is on the designing and scaling of a High Temperature Gas-cooled Reactor (HTGR) accident testing facility. What excites me primarily about the work I am doing is that we are basically trying to build a miniature version of a nuclear reactor in the backyard. The project at the beginning required to make a lot of CAD drawings after extracting all the dimensions of a HTGR reactor from published research papers. After getting over with the geometry I am required to simulate this facility using the concepts of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) on famous softwares like ANSYS.

Prof. Revankar is a busy man but is very innovative and quick to provide ideas during the discussions I had with them for fixing the bottle necks that were faced during the course of the project. I was also required to submit a weekly progress report on the work done during the week. All in all, this is a very enriching experience and has provided me an opportunity to actually study in depth, an intangible component of the source of renewable energy for any advance economy on this planet.

WORDS OF ADVICE

To any research enthusiast in our department I would like to tell that your interest in the field of chemical engineering is very important to push you ahead when you face a bottleneck and thus performing a worthwhile task. As I said earlier that I didn’t got selected in any university through apping so it is also important to be patient and trust your skills you have gained during the course of your study.

All the best!