ABOUT ME

Some background about myself... I am Kushal Sosale, from Bangalore, India. I am an undergraduate student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, currently in my second-year.

My deep passion for Mechanical Engineering started around the age of 4, when I found myself pondering over the working of a washing machine. Since then, I've been fascinated by machines ranging from railway locomotives, turbines, and earth-movers to household appliances like washing machines and power tools!

A showcase of my work and projects in the field of Mechanical Engineering:

Computer Aided Engineering:

Currently, I am working part-time as a CAE Engineer at Raptee Energy Inc., a start-up building high-performance electric motorcycles. I completed my internship at Raptee in November 2021, and have been working part-time since December 2021. I use methods such as Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to evaluate the performance characteristics of various vehicle components. TL;DR: I use computational methods to make sure the design is mechanically viable, and doesn't explode into a million pieces, or melt into a liquid!

Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV-IITK):

I am a member of the student team AUV-IITK. We build Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) for multiple International and National competitions. I work on both vehicle design and simulation. My work mainly involves designing components using Computer Aided Design (CAD) and simulating them to evaluate their performance. TL;DR: I engineer autonomous submarines!

Other projects:

Being passionate about Mechanical Engineering, motorsport is a short hop from there! And hence my avid interest in motorsport and the engineering behind it. I'm talking about Formula ONE, of course!

The fastest cars on the planet and the extreme engineering that goes into them have intrigued me for about 5 years now. So I decided to use my basic experience in CFD, and the insane software used for it to analyze the aerodynamics of F1 cars.

Above are a couple of snips of a CFD simulation I did on a 2020-spec F1 REAR WING. All 3D CAD was done using Solidworks® and the simulation was done on Ansys Fluent®.

Hobbies and other interests:

Gaming and E-Sports:

Ah gaming!.... The most effective stress-buster. I have been into PC gaming since I was 12, and I'm still going with the same enthusiasm. My love for PC gaming translated into enthusiasm for high-performance PC hardware and I've since built and owned three high-end gaming desktops (we call them towers!). Glory to the PC MASTER RACE, "May our framerates be high and our temperatures low".

My favourite genres of PC games are Sim Racing, Flight Simulation, and Open-World RPGs. For an F1 geek like myself, the official F1 games are no-brainers. I have clocked over 450 hours on just the F1 games with a full sim-racing setup, along with 100 hours on the likes of Project CARS 1 & 2!

Something about the genre of Simulation games gets me hooked to them, much like my love for Mechanical Simulations. The best of this genre for me are the flight simulators Prepar3D® and Digital Combat Simulator World. The thrill of flying fighter aircraft we see in airshows on a high-fidelity simulator like DCS World is inexplicable!

Who doesn't like an Open-world RPG? Talk about GTA 5... for me, the Assassin's Creed franchise is right up there. I've completed 5 installments in the franchise and it is by far my favourite in this genre. Of course, I've played FPS games such as the Call of Duty series, but FPS games aren't nearly as good as the ones above.

Photography:

I shoot with a Nikon D5200 with 35 mm and 70-300 mm lenses and a Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra and edit using Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom. I mostly capture abstract scenes with no single subject, but I really like astrophotography. Some of my favourite shots are above.