JADHAV RESEARCH
Web pages of Ajit Jadhav
Home Training Consultancy Work Experience Academics Research Publications Miscellaneous Links	Academics -- Ph. D. (in progress) (Mechanical Engg.) -- Diploma in Advanced Computing -- Graduate School Fellow (Materials Engg.) -- M. Tech. (Industrial Metallurgy) -- B. E. (Metallurgy) -- Schooling -- Scholarships   In Progress: Ph. D. (Mechanical Engineering) College of Engineering (COEP), University of Pune, India 2004 - continuing Research Topic: "A new approach to computer modeling and analysis of certain fundamental field problems from engineering sciences" Guide: Dr. S. R. Kajale, Professor and Head, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, COEP Earlier Guide: Dr. P. P. Chikate, Emeritus Fellow, AICTE If the remaining computer trials yield results as anticipated, I might be able to submit my thesis right this year (2006). The reserach topic is described in detail in the computational mechanics section of the Research page. The papers and slides are available on the Publications page. I was offered admission with scholarship at IIT Madras to research this self-invented method, but chose to stay in Pune out of personal reasons.   Diploma in Advanced Computing ACTS, C-DAC, Pune, India 1994 (6 months) (The first full-time batch of this diploma) 62.75% marks; "B" grade Modules: Elements of Advanced Computing, Advanced C and Unix, Object Oriented Programming (C++), Programming in MS Windows, Parallel Processing, Image Processing, Graphics and Geometric Modeling, GUI using X and Motif, Digital Multimedia, RDBMS using Oracle, Data Communications and Networking. With so many modules compressed in 6 months, this was the most intense academic experience I had ever had. (I had learnt C just two months before the course entrance examination, and beginning with the third module, the assignments were all in C++.) We were sort of ginea pigs, and after the experience with our first batch, they brought about some sanity by reducing the sheer number of modules. Project: Software development for simple finite element modeling (FEM) of electrostatic fields. Received second-best marks in the class for this project work.   Graduate School Fellow (Materials Engineering) University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), Birmingham, AL, USA Fall 1990 to Spring 1993 GPA: 3.16/4.00 Courses: X-Ray Diffraction, Sintering, Advanced Thermodynamics of Materials, Quantitative Microscopy, Solid State Physics, Electron Microscopy, Failure Analysis, Advanced Transmission Electron Microscopy, Advanced Solidification, Advanced Physical Metallurgy, Advanced Phase Diagrams, Structure and Properties of Surfaces and Interfaces, Labs and seminars. Research Areas: Processing, modeling and fracture mechanics of ceramic composites, especially the SiC-particulate/Alumina-matrix composites Research advisor: Dr. B. R. Patterson, Professor Research co-advisor: Dr. G. M. Janowski, Assistant Professor I received this University-wide Graduate School Fellowship to pursue the Ph. D. program in Materials Engineering at the time that GRE scores were cancelled for all centers from India. UAB was the only university, it seems, which believed that I could have scored 710/800 (96 P) in verbal and 800/800 (98+P) in quantitative, in the GRE that was cancelled. (ETS did give them access to the scores, though they officially cancelled all the scores.) The scores for the make-up examination ETS conducted two months later got cancelled too. (In both cases, rumour went, they suspected mass-copying at some centers, esp. the Hyderabad center.) In the meanwhile, in the absence of GRE scores, some 10+ other, higher-ranked US universities declined to at all consider my application. (Remember, good folks from Hyderabad suffered too, along with I.) My subsequent scores at the second make-up examination, and after already having received this fellowship, and so without any motivation left to actually circle those answers with pencil to score well, esp. in the final half an hour at that third GRE, were: 680/800 (89 P) in verbal and 800/800 (98+ P) in quantitative. The UAB fellowship came without any obligation for teaching or even any fixed laboratory research under a particular professor, for one year or even more, depending on the convenience of the student and the faculty. Over the next 2.5 years, I completed 36 credit-hours of course-work (minimum 18 being necessary for MS and 24 for Ph D). However, I could not complete the Ph D degree itself. An MS degree in its stead, to recognize the course-work and research I did, was somehow considered out of question too--though the credits I completed were twice the requirement for an MS. Not completing the Ph D degree happened out of many reasons, not all of them having to do with my competence (or lack of it). Yet, a part of the reason indeed was that my interest in mechanics was deepening at that time. I therefore was not as passionately interested in materials processing--though I did co-discover a new way of making certain kind of ceramic composites (i.e. without using the usual hot-pressing process). It seems that a series of papers later on appeared to further develop this seminal sort of work which was co-originated by my Indian class-mate and I--more or less out of desperation, because the hot press was then broke, and we needed to show some research results! I was at UAB until the first paper got published. (So, I had something to write for an MS thesis if they would permit.) The list of the course-work (then offered at UAB and completed by me) doesn't show it, but the fact is, we at UAB were then at the initial stage of a new research program on structural ceramic composites. I did an extensive literature review, and prepapred two reports: (i) Toughening Mechanisms in Ceramics and (ii) Micro-cracking in Certain Ceramic Composites. Both the reports and their journal references (a list running into 100+ articles) can be made available on request. I also conducted ad-hoc seminar on advanced fracture mechanics and fracture-mechanical models for our resarch group. (I taught myself elasticity and plasticity theories and fracture mechanics beyond what I knew through my M Tech studies, for this purpose, through self-study.) The research program at UAB, however, later on turned to processing rather than fracture mechanics, the mechanics aspects being allocated to certain other universities nearby in the funding arrangement. If you can easily discount the fact that my Ph D degree got delayed by more than a decade (and by implication, possibly, the green-card/US citizenship too) then it should also be easy for you to say that the experience has not been a complete waste. And you could claim to be on the side of truth too, in a way: Many of the questions that I now answer in my on-going Ph. D. were developed by me (or made more precise) right during this time period. Further (because I know you wanted to ask): Regardless of the above, my relations with my research advisors themselves remained fairly cordial. In fact, they did successfully recommend me to the much higher ranked Mechanics and Materials program at University of California, San Diego (UCSD). The UCSD program had been consistently ranked within top 15 or so, even within top 10 on many occasions. In comparison, and by the criteria they apply, UAB materials engineering (not science) was then ranked at 60+ or 90+ depending on who you wanted to believe. But just about the same time, this UCSD research group lost much of their research funding, and so couldn't have supported me. So, I had to return to India, and never did in fact join the UCSD program. The Professors (including the Director) at UCSD kept accepting collect calls from me for more than six months after I had returned to India (because I could not afford expensive international calls), but they still didn't receive funding. (I knew they were telling the truth--not just being diplomatically polite to a Ph D failure--because I also had a friend's friend doing graduate studies at UCSD, and his view from the trenches confirmed what they told me directly.) Finally, I decided to accept admission offer from the rather competitive C-DAC's diploma once I had managed to pass their entrance (being placed within 40 out of 10000). Thus, that end-result about a decade's delay in the Ph D degree (and don't tell the United States INS, but also of green card) remained identical!   M. Tech. (Industrial Metallurgy) Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India 1985 - 1987 CGPA: 8.25/10.00 (10/10 in project work) Courses: Basics of Fabrication Processes, Moulding Processes and Materials, Heat Treatment Technology, Welding Application Technology, Corrosion Engineering, Metallurgical Failure Analysis, Mechanical Behavior of Materials, Industrial Instrumentation, Non-Destructive Testing, Reliability Engineering, Computers in Engineering. Labs, seminars, and summer industrial training, extra. All courses had significant journals content; about half of the courses were exclusively based on journal articles. Project: "Application oriented studies of electrolytic heating" Guide: Dr.-Ing. R. Vasudevan, Professor In this inter-disciplinary research, I discovered a new form of under-water arcing, and also experimentally determined the various operating parameters under which it must occur. The new form of arcing was found to be actually detrimental to deploying the electrolytic heating process in the industrial settings. Thus, contrary to the expectations at the beginning of the project, my research work only served towards rejecting some of the equipment design proposals that had been made by some 3-4 earlier batches of the B Tech and M Tech students at IIT Madras. My project received the "Excellent" grade, i.e. 10/10 points. For entrance to M Tech, I could hardly find time to study for the GATE (and this is honest!). Further, two batches of B Techs (4 and 5 year programs) took GATE that year, thereby supposedly increasing competition in percentile scores at the higher end. But, somehow, I got enough of a score (94 P) to get accepted for M Tech in Mechanical Engineering in all those IITs who would then admit Metallurgical graduates into their Mechanical programs. (If I remember right, IIT Bombay was one of them). As far as M Tech (or ME) in the same branch--Metallurgy--is concerned, the score was, of course, enough to get into any of the IITs (or the IISc). I went to do Metallurgy at IIT Madras out of three reasons: Firstly, because Metallurgy at IIT Madras offered relatively far more academic freedom to choose courses. I ended up taking courses from many different specializations, even branches. (My M Tech course advisor--not the same as project guide--called it a "masala mix" of courses, but did permit each one of my choices!) Secondly, even before GATE got introduced, IIT Madras was the only IIT which conducted its own entrance test for M Tech admissions at 25+ centers all over India. They, thus, seemed to take M Tech seriously--unlike other IITs that seemed to have a bias towards JEE and B Techs. And I knew of a few of my seniors at COEP who had gone to IIT Madras--almost all of them were University rankers (though I was not!). Thirdly, IIT Madras had a standing reputation for Mechanical Sciences, including Metallurgy. On all three counts, once I had the option of IIT Madras, it seemed a natural choice. (That year, Metallurgy at IIT Madras happened to cut off at the highest percentile, ahead of all other IITs and IISc Bangalore.)   B. E. (Metallurgy) College of Engineering (COEP), University of Pune, India 1979 - 1983 66% marks; First Class with Distinction Some of the Courses: Engineering Mathematics I through IV, Applied Physics, Applied Mechanics, Strength of Materials, Structure & Properties of Materials, Electrical Technology (a second electrical course), Electronics & Instrumentation, Thermodynamics, Metallurgical Thermodynamics (including kinetics), Mechanical Engineering I & II (fluid mechanics, heat transfer, and a few miscellaneous topics like IC engines, refrigeration, etc.), Machine Tools & Workshop Technology (a second workshop course emphasizing m/c tools, metrology), Physical Metallurgy I & II (roughly, Brick, Gordon, Phillips + Reed-Hill + supplemental material), Mechanical Working & Fabrication of Metals I & II (roughly, topics from the stress theory & metal-working sections from Dieter complemented by the "MST" handbook + powder metallurgy + welding), Metallurgical Drawing & Design (including fracture mechanics and some Shigley), Structural Metallurgy (scale of atomic through solid-state physics through interfaces through dislocation theory), Experimental Techniques in Metallurgy (x-ray and electron diffraction, vacuum technology), Foundry Technology (Heine et al. + ASM Handbook), Heat Treatment & Furnace Technology (ASM Handbook), Selection of Materials & Specifications (with a lot of individual and group assignments on design and failure analysis case studies on the lines of ASM, ASME and SAE publications); Technical Control & Management (computer programming, PERT-CPM, complimented by the usual management blurb to make it easy for the final year student to pass in his other courses.) Lab/workshop practice courses, extra. Many seminars (about 4-8/year in the last two years). Project: "Bend formability" Guide: Dr. R. D. Choudhary, Professor In this project, I tried to verify an idea suggested in prior literature (actually, a research-cum-professional journal): viz. that formability could be estimated using the very simple means of manually bending bars to progressively smaller radii of curvature, to the point of the onset of cracking. The idea was attractive because the tool to determine formability in this way (viz. a simple pipe acting as a wrench-bar) can be expected to be available on any shop-floor. The results of the experiments were, however, mixed. (A personal recounting of this project is on the Miscellaneous page.) One thing that I may mention here is that despite spending very first year out of home, in hostels, in the branch-selection process after FE (COEP's term for the first year of engineering), initially Electrical, and later on Mechanical branch was available to me by open merit. But I chose Metallurgy because it seemed new to me (though Metallurgy had been introduced at COEP right in 1948). Metallurgy also seemed sufficiently close to Mechanical--just in case! One important fallout of the decision has been having to tell people, without much success, that at least at COEP, metallurgical undergraduates would be taught more or a deeper sort of stress analysis than mechanical undergraduates proper, and hence, with a bit of further training, metallurgical graduates would be actually far better suited to mechanical design than is the perception. At least with the program our batch did, I didn't find any mechanical graduate conversant with, say, index notation of tensors, or be able to tell the physical significance (and not just mathematical formula) of von Mises' criteron versus Tresca's--why each must work better given its basic correlation standard and for its own class of materials, but from a mechanics point of view, not metallographic. You see, Shigley and others don't bring out this point very well, and so, they didn't know! And then, somehow, even educated people in HR departments of companies would manage to confuse Metallurgy with Mining Engineering--or seemed to have formed a mental association of Metallurgical graduates with hardness tests and chemical analysis in some sidey lab! (Exceptions might have been there, but only to prove the rule!!) Not just in India, but also seems to be so in the USA--the only difference seems to be that, there, they associate transmission electron microscopy and what they call quality control with what they call Materials graduates. That's the only difference. It's a waste of HR--the actual resources, not of the company-departments carrying the name. As far as I am concerned, my current Ph D is in Mechanical Engineering though :) So, count me out as far as fighting this wrong perception goes! ;)   Schooling Did the schooling up to the IX standard in five different Marathi medium schools from the rural parts/towns of the Maharashtra state of India. Always stood first in schools. Due to certain circumstances, I could appear for the Maharashtra State Open Merit Scholarship only in standard VII (but not in standard IV), and got it. My rank probably put me in about 150 out of about 50,000 in the state. The scholarship was continued up to HSC (standard XII) Did the year of SSC (standard X) from Pethe High School, Nasik (Pune Divisional Board). Received Distinction class (81% marks). Did the year of HSC (standard XII) from SRYK College of Science, Nasik (Pune Divisional Board). Received Distinction class (76% marks overall, 89.67% marks in Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics).   Scholarships Standard VII through X: Maharashtra State Open Merit High-School Scholarship Standard X through XII: above scholarship, continued for satisfactory academic performance M Tech: Open Merit Scholarship, IIT Madras Ph. D. Studies: Graduate School Fellowship, University of Alabama at Birmingham Ph. D.: (was offered) Research Assistantship, IIT Madras
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