Research Interests

Experimental Thermofluids Laboratory at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur aims to engage in methodical experimentation by delving deep to unearth various facets of a particular problem and broadening our understanding of fundamentals in thermo-fluids as they apply to real-world applications. We aspire to understand the underlying physics to better visualize and model many natural phenomena and unravel the numerous challenges in this domain. The thrust areas in our research group include thermal convection in porous media, pool boiling heat transfer, jet breakup behavior and instability in immiscible liquid-liquid systems, and thermo-hydraulic performance augmentation in minichannel heat exchangers. Some topics that we are currently working on are:

Buoyancy-driven convection at high Rayleigh numbers

Buoyancy-driven convection at high Rayleigh numbers

Madanan and Goldstein • Phys. Fluids • 2020

Heat Transfer Enhancement

Heat transfer enhancement

Sudheer and Madanan • Therm. Sci. Eng. Prog. • 2022

Porous Media Convection

Porous media convection

Alam and Madanan • Int. J. Therm. Sci. • 2026

Pool boiling at atmospheric conditions on plain copper substrates

Ongoing Research

Experimental and Numerical Study of Heat Transfer Characteristics in Darcy-Bénard System at High Rayleigh numbers

Parvez Alam (FARE Fellow)

Experimental Investigation on the Effect of Surfactant, Pressure, and Surface Modification on Pool Boiling Heat Transfer in Confined and Unconfined Conditions

Gyanesh Kumar (Ph.D. student)

Thermal Management of Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells

Priyanka Rajeev (Ph.D. student)

Thermohydraulics of Supercritical Fluids in Compact Heat Exchanger Applications

Ayush Bhupendra Ninave and Kartik Navalgund (M.Tech. students)

Passive Thermal Management of High-Power-Density Electronic Systems

Sumant Pentapalli (M.Tech. student)