R. I. Sujith
Sujith Raman Pillai Indusekharan Nair, known as R. I. Sujith, is an Indian aerospace engineer. He is Institute Professor and the D. Srinivasan Chair Professor at the Department of Aerospace Engineering at IIT Madras.
Early life
Sujith was born on 11 May 1967 in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India. He completed his Bachelor of Technology in aerospace engineering at IIT Madras. He earned his PhD in aerospace engineering on "Behavior of Droplets in Axial Acoustic Fields" working with Ben T. Zinn at the Georgia Institute of Technology from 1990 to 1994. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the same department from 1994 to 1995. He then joined IIT Madras as a lecturer in the Department of Aerospace Engineering.Research
Sujith's research has been in the field of thermo-acoustic instability. He demonstrated that low-amplitude aperiodic pressure fluctuations, or combustion noise, are deterministic and chaotic. He modelled the state of intermittency as the intermediate dynamical state as turbulent thermo-acoustic systems transition from the state of combustion noise to the state of thermo-acoustic instability. He suggested that combustion noise exhibits multifractality, which vanishes with the onset of instability. His analogy of the onset of oscillatory instabilities to Bose-Einstein condensation has provided universal scaling laws for various systems.Sujith's introduction of complex networks to thermo-acoustics has shown structural changes in network topology during transitions from combustion noise to instability, aiding in early detection of such transitions. His research has involved a variety of topics relevant in thermo-acoustic systems such as the chimera states, R-tipping, synchronisation theory, amplitude death, partial amplitude death, and phase flip bifurcation.