Advaith S.

Indian Institute of Technology Madras | IIT Madras · Department of Mechanical Engineering

Leveraging data collected from smart meters in buildings can aid in developing policies towards energy conservation. Significant energy savings could be realised if deviations in the building operating conditions are detected early, and appropriate measures are taken. Towards this end, machine learning techniques can be used to automate the discove...

India’s ambitious goals of achieving 50% of energy generation from renewables by 2030 and net zero energy by 2070 at the COP26 conference require robust integration of renewable energy with the current fossil fuel grid as a transition phase. The inherent intermittent nature of renewables mandates an efficient energy storage system to ensure a relia...

The effects of an inlet inertial jet on the thermal blending of hot and cold heat transfer fluid (molten salt) for a single tank sensible thermal energy storage system are studied using numerical simulations. The simulations show the evolution of the initial stratified layer (thermocline) for a temperature difference of 300 K with a corresponding A...

Vortex rings are turbulent coherent structures that are ubiquitous in various application domains ranging from gas turbines to aquatic locomotion. The vortex rings are highly sensitive to a variety of external governing parameters. In this paper, we have quantitatively investigated the topology and formation mechanisms of such rings under the effec...

The demand for renewable energy sources is limited by their inherent intermittent nature. The thermal energy storage technique overcomes this shortcoming by allowing storage of naturally occurring energy (e.g. solar) during “non-peak hours”. The article presents an experimental investigation of the sparsely studied ‘single medium thermocline’ (SMT)...

This chapter highlights the multiscale concentrated solar power thrust, which focused on developing new low-cost manufacturable technologies for both high- and moderate-temperature thermal cycles. In the high-temperature range, the focus was on the supercritical carbon dioxide (s-CO2) Brayton cycle. Research involved developing low-cost heliostats...

There has been considerable number of studies on vortex rings for more than a century. Nevertheless, there has been a lacuna in the experimental studies of successive vortex rings and their interaction. The present study intends to correlate the interaction among two successive vortex rings generated with a predetermined time delay and their intera...

Oil based thermal energy storage system offers a higher energy storage density as compared to other solar energy storage techniques. The present paper focuses specifically on the practical viability thermocline storage system. A lab scale setup has been developed at Thermal Energy Research Laboratory, Indian Institute of Science Bangalore. The expe...

Vortex interaction with density stratification is ubiquitous in nature and applied to various engineering applications. Present study have characterized the spatial and temporal dynamics of the interaction between a vortex and a density stratified interface. The present work is prompted by our research on~single tank Thermal Energy Storage (TES) sy...

This work experimentally investigates the dynamics of interaction between a propagating vortex ring and density stratified interface of finite thickness. The flow evolution has been quantified using a high speed shadowgraph technique and particle image velocimetry. The spatial and temporal behaviours of the vortex in the near and far field of the i...

Evolution of vortex rings in iso-density and iso-viscosity fluid have been studied analytically using a novel mathematical model. The model predicts spatio-temporal variation in peak vorticity, circulation, vortex size and spacing based on instantaneous vortex parameters. This proposed model is quantitatively verified using experimental measurements....

Molten-salt thermocline-based systems are a low-cost option for single-tank thermal energy storage in concentrated solar power plants. Due to the high variability in solar energy availability, these energy storage devices are subject to transient heat loads during charging that can affect the storage efficiency. Numerical simulations were conducted...

The stratification efficiency of single tank thermal energy storage is affected by the internal mixing processes, especially in the thermocline region due to disturbances of different kinds. To study the mixing dynamics at the interface, we have conducted detailed numerical and supporting experimental studies for different Atwood numbers (stratific...

Experiments were conducted to investigate the evolution of counter rotating vortices in stratified and unstratified tank. Vortices were created by adding a small slug of fluid from the top plane into system. The resulting mixing dynamics in thin and thick interface were analyzed. In unstratified system the vortices penetrate through the height of t...