physics

Rajat Mittal

Rajat Mittal is a physics topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Rajat Mittal rather than just read about it. In short: Rajat Mittal is a computational fluid dynamicist and a professor of mechanical engineering in the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. He holds a secondary appointment in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Key takeaways

Rajat Mittal belongs to physics; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Rajat Mittal to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Rajat Mittal from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Rajat Mittal is a computational fluid dynamicist and a professor of mechanical engineering in the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. He holds a secondary appointment in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is known for his work on immersed boundary methods (IBMs) and applications of these methods to the study of fluid flow problems.

Biography Mittal earned his bachelor's degree in aeronautical engineering from IIT Kanpur in 1989. He received an MS in aerospace engineering from University of Florida and a PhD in applied mechanics from University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign 1991 and 1995, respectively. He completed postdoctoral research at the Center for Turbulence Research at Stanford University, where he conducted research in large-eddy simulation of complex turbulent flows. From 1996 to 2001, he was on the faculty of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Florida. From 2001 to 2009, Mittal was on the faculty of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at George Washington University. He has been a professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins University since 2009 and a professor of medicine since 2015. Mittal is the founder and chief technical officer of HeartMetrics, Inc., a start-up that develops computational tools to help the treatment of coronary artery disease.

Research Mittal leads the Flow Physics and Computation Lab at Johns Hopkins. The focus of Mittal's lab is on fundamental fluid mechanics phenomenon and numerical analysis. In particular, his lab works on computational modeling of fluid flows, biofluid mechanics, bioinspired engineering, biomedical engineering, and flow control. Recent projects have focused on flow control, flow-induced flutter, flow-induced vibration, biolocomotion, biosensing, bioacoustics, cardiovascular hemodynamics, heart murmurs and thrombosis, gastric fluid mechanics, and the flow physics of COVID-19. During his time at Johns Hopkins, Mittal has made significant contributions to many topics in fluid mechanics, spanning cardiovascular fluid dynamics, fundamental mechanisms of human and animal swimming, development of immersed boundary methods, iterative methods in scientific computing, bioacoustics, and turbulent flows. Mittal is also a holder of multiple patents on image-based analysis of cardiovascular hemodynamics.

Awards and honors 2022: 2022 Stanley Corrsin Award, for seminal and visionary contributions to the development of immersed boundary methods 2021: 2021 ASME Freeman Scholar, for pioneering work on immersed boundary methods 2020: Monte and Usha Ahuja Distinguished Lecture, "The Unknown Unknowns of the Airborne Transmission of COVID-19." Sept. 4, 2020. The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH. 2011: Elected Fellow of the American Physical Society 2011: Elected Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers 2008: Minta-Martin Lecture, University of Maryland at College Park, MD. 2006: ASME Lewis B Moody Award from the ASME Fluids Engineering Division, for his paper titled "Vortex Dynamics and Mechanisms for Viscous Losses in the Tip-Clearance Flow," FEDSM2005-77175. 1999: Pratt & Whitney Fellows Lecture, "Direct and Large–Eddy Simulation of Flows in Complex Geometries." East Hartford, CT. 1996: The Francois Naftali Frenkiel Award for Fluid Mechanics, from the Division of Fluid Dynamics of The American Physical Society, for paper titled "Effect of three-dimensionality on the lift and drag of nominally two-dimensional cylinder," published in Physics of Fluids.

Editorship Associate Editor, Journal of Computational Physics (2009 onwards) Associate Editor, Journal of Experimental Biology (2012 onwards) Associate Editor, Frontiers in Computational Physiology and Medicine (2010 onwards). Member, Editorial Board of International Journal of Numerical Methods in Bioeng. (2019 onwards) Guest Editor, Theoretical and Computational Fluid Dynamics (2023)

Publications

Selected articles H.S. Udaykumar, R. Mittal, P. Rampunggoon and A.Khanna. "A Sharp Interface Cartesian Grid Method for Simulating Flows with Complex Moving Boundaries." Journal of Computational Physics, Vol 174, 345-380, 2001. (162 Citations) R. Mittal. "Computational Biohydrodynamics: Trends, Challenges and Recent Advances." IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering Vol. 29, No. 3, pp. 595–604, 2004. R. Mittal and G. Iaccarino. "Immersed Boundary Methods." Annual Review Of Fluid Mechanics, Vol. 37, pp. 239–261, 2005. R. Holman, Y. Utturkar, R. Mittal, B. Smith and L. Cattafesta. "A Jet Formation Criterion for Synthetic Jets." AIAA Journal, Vol. 43, No.10, October 2005. (52 Citations) R Mittal, BD Erath, MW Plesniak. "Fluid Dynamics of Human Phonation and Speech." Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics, Vol. 45:437-467, 2013. Rajat Mittal, Jung Hee Seo, Vijay Vedula, Young J. Choi, Hang Liu, H. Howie Huang, Saurabh Jain, Laurent Younes, Theodore Abraham, and Richard T. George. "Computational modeling of cardiac hemodynamics: Current status and future outlook." Journal of Computational Physics, Volume 305, 2016. R Mittal, R Ni, JH Seo. "The flow physics of COVID-19." Journal of Fluid Mechanics Volume 894, 2020.

Books Synthetic Jets: Fundamentals and Applications, Eds. Kamran Mohseni, Rajat Mittal. CRC Press. September 17, 2014 by CRC Press. Reference - 382 Pages - 261 B/W Illustrations ISBN 9781439868102.

References

External links Faculty webpage Flow Physics and Computation Lab

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Rajat Mittal

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Rajat Mittal claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In physics, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Rajat Mittal before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Rajat Mittal ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Rajat Mittal

In research: Rajat Mittal appears in physics research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Rajat Mittal in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Rajat Mittal is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1967 births, American physicists, Fellows of the American Physical Society, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Rajat Mittal outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Rajat Mittal in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Rajat Mittal means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Rajat Mittal out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Rajat Mittal in simple terms?

Why does Rajat Mittal matter?

Because it connects several physics ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Rajat Mittal?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Rajat Mittal.