About

Utsav Purkait

Research Assistant, IIT Bombay
B.E. Mechanical Engineering + Minor Aeronautics — BITS Pilani, Hyderabad

I'm a mechanical engineer and CFD researcher with a deep fascination for the chaotic beauty of turbulence. My work sits at the intersection of high-fidelity simulation and RANS closure physics — trying to understand not just what the models predict, but why they fail. Turbulent Thoughts is where I share that thinking openly, for engineers and students who want more than surface-level explanations.

UP
6+
CFD & simulation tools
3+
Years of research & projects
20+
Articles on Turbulent Thoughts
7+
Research projects

Background

I graduated from BITS Pilani, Hyderabad in 2025 with a B.E. in Mechanical Engineering and a Minor in Aeronautics, finishing in the top 2.5% of my discipline with a CGPA of 8.69.

My research has taken me from turbulent planar free-shear jets at IIT Bombay to tornado-like vortex simulators at the University of Wyoming. The common thread: using CFD not just to get answers, but to understand when and why the models themselves break down.


Why this blog

Most CFD resources either stop at button-clicking tutorials or jump straight into dense mathematics. Turbulent Thoughts tries to occupy the space in between — rigorous enough to be useful, clear enough to actually build intuition.

I write about the failures as much as the successes: solvers that silently break conservation, models that fail structurally rather than numerically, simulations that look right but aren't. That's where the real learning is.

Journey

Timeline

Present
Research
Research Assistant — IIT Bombay
Reynolds Stress Anisotropy in Turbulent Planar Free-Shear Jets · Mumbai
  • Studying structural failure modes of RANS closure in representing turbulence anisotropy using high-fidelity LES data
  • Analysing anisotropy states through Lumley triangle, barycentric map, and anisotropy tensor glyphs
  • Identified systematic RANS bias toward plane-strain anisotropy — failure arises from structural constraints of the Boussinesq hypothesis, not model calibration
  • Preparing manuscript for Physics of Fluids
Jul 2025
Blog
Founded Turbulent Thoughts
turbulentthoughts.com
Started writing in-depth articles on fluid mechanics and CFD — making research-level concepts accessible to engineers, students, and researchers worldwide.
Sep–Dec 2024
Research
Bachelor's Thesis — University of Wyoming
Design & Simulation of a Tornado-like Flow Simulator · Laramie, USA
  • Led CFD simulation and validation of a dual-shell tornado simulator replicating Rankine vortex dynamics using an 8M-cell RANS k-ω SST model in Fluent
  • Conducted parametric studies varying fan speed and guide vane angle, analysing influence on vortex intensity, core radius, and swirl ratio
  • Physical experiments on fabricated model showed deviations less than 8.5%
2023–2024
Project
Vortex Shedding & Wake Dynamics Behind Bluff Bodies
BITS Pilani, Hyderabad
  • Developed 2D transient CFD models for flow past circular and square cylinders sweeping Re from 5 to 50,000
  • Extracted shedding frequencies via FFT on lift coefficients; quantified Strouhal–Reynolds relationship against established data
Oct 2021
Education
B.E. Mechanical Engineering + Minor Aeronautics
BITS Pilani, Hyderabad Campus · Graduated Jul 2025
CGPA 8.69/10 — ranked in the top 5 students (top 2.5%) in the Mechanical Engineering discipline. Completed a Minor in Aeronautics alongside the core degree.
Technical skills

CFD & Simulation

ANSYS Fluent OpenFOAM ANSYS Structural LS-DYNA COMSOL ParaView

Programming

Python NumPy / SciPy Matplotlib scikit-learn MATLAB C / C++

CAD & Design

SOLIDWORKS Fusion 360 PTC Creo AutoCAD
Certifications
⚙️
Applied Computational Fluid Dynamics
Siemens via Coursera — 2026
🌊
Fundamentals of Fluid-Solid Interactions
École Polytechnique via Coursera — 2025
🐍
Programming Numerical Methods in Python
Udemy — 2025