Biography

Born in Madras in 1978, Dr. Sundararajan Natarajan (Sundar) joined the Machine Design Section, Department of Mechanical Engineering, IIT Madras on 10th Sep 2014, as an Assistant Professor. Before this Sundar was a post-doctoral research fellow in the School of Civil & Environmental Engineering, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Sundar graduated in Computational Mechanics with a PhD from Cardiff University, UK, under the guidance of Professor Stéphane PA Bordas and Dr Pierre Kerfriden.

Sundar is an active member of legato team. Sundar’s research interests includes development and application of advanced discretization techniques for moving boundary problems within a multi physics/multiscale framework.

GIAN Courses

• Free boundary problems in Mechanics, 23-21. Oct 2019 with Prof. Stéphane PA Bordas, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg.
• Partition of Unity Methods, 12 – 18 Dec 2016 with Prof. N. Sukumar, University of California, Davis, USA.
• Scaled Boundary Finite Element Method, 14-18, Nov 2016 with Prof. Chongmin Song, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.
• Nonlinear continuum mechanics, 18 – 29 Jul 2016 with Prof. Timon Rabczuk, Bauhaus University, Weimar, Germany.
• Multiscale Methods in Mechanics (3M), 23 May – 3 Jun 2016, with Prof. Stéphane PA Bordas, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg.

Visiting Positions

1. Honorary Research Fellow, Department of Aerospace Engineering, University of Bristol, UK, since 2021.
2. UTS-KTP visiting fellow, University of Technology-Sydney, Australia, 2016.
3. Visiting fellow, Laboratory of Mechanics and Materials, School of Engineering, Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece, 2013,
4. Academic visitor, Department of Engineering Mechanics, Chongqing University, China, 2012.

Awards & Honors

1. Post-doctoral research fellow, School of Civil & Environmental Engineering, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, 2012-2014.
2. Session Chair, Advances & Applications of the Generalized/Extended Finite Element Method, USNCCM 2013, Jul 22-25, 2013.
3. NSF travel award to attend NSF workshop on ‘Barycentric coordinates in Geometry Processing and Finite/Boundary Element Methods’, July 25-27 2012, USA.
4. Zienkiewicz best PhD prize, Association of Computational Mechanics in Engineering, 2012.
5. Overseas Research Students Awards Scheme, PhD studentship, UK, 2008 – 2011.
6. Cardiff School of Engineering PhD Studentship, Cardiff University, Wales, 2009-2011..
7. Best student paper presentation, 23rd Biennial Conference on Numerical Analysis, Strathclyde, UK, June 2009.
8. Management award for outstanding contribution to business through technology, GE-ITC, 2005, 2007
9. Gold medalist – undergraduate education, Bharathiar University, 1999.
10. Best outgoing student – Kongu Engineering College, Erode, 1999.

Selected Publications

1. Q Zhang, SPA Bordas, J Liu, S Natarajan, NURBS-Enhanced polygonal scaled boundary finite element method for heat diffusion in anisotropic media with internal heat sources, Engineering Analysis with Boundary Elements, Accepted, 2023.
2. S Vengatesan, S Natarajan, PV Jeyakarthikeyan, n+1 integration scheme for polygonal elements using Richardson extrapolation, Mathematics and Computers in Simulation, v205, 659-677, 2023.
3. R Assaf, C Birk, S Natarajan, H Gravenkamp, Three-dimensional phase-field modelling of brittle fracture using an adaptive octree-based scaled boundary finite element approach, Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, Accepted, 2022.
4. S Natarajan, ET Ooi, C Birk, C Song, Adaptive modelling of dynamic brittle fracture – a combined phase field regularised cohesive zone model and scaled boundary finite element approach, International Journal of Fracture, Accepted, 2022.
5. C Lee, IV Singh, S Natarajan, A cell-based smoothed finite element method for gradient elasticity, Engineering with Computers, Accepted, 2022.
6. J Rajaguru, M Dwivedi, S Natarajan, K Hariharan, N Arunachalam, Machining induced residual stress prediction during orthogonal cutting of super duplex stainless steel using CEL approach, Journal of Manufacturing Processes, Accepted, 2022.
7. M Arrutselvi, D Adak, E Natarajan, S Roy, S Natarajan, Virtual element analysis of nonlocal coupled parabolic problems on polygonal meshes, Calcolo, Accepted, 2022.
8. Y Li, T Yu,  S Natarajan, An adaptive isogeometric phase field method for brittle fracture in rock-like materials, Engineering Fracture Mechanics, v263, 108298, 2022.
9. D Adak, D Mora, S Natarajan, Convergence analysis of virtual element method for nonlinear nonlocal dynamic plate equation, Journal of Scientific Computing, Accepted, 2022.
10. TM Balaramakrishnan, S Natarajan, S Sujatha, Energy storage and stress-strain characteristics of a prosthetic foot: a priori design and analysis with experiments, International Journal for Numerical Methods in Biomedical Engineering, v38, e3589, 2022.
11. G Kumar Yadav, S Natarajan, B Srinivasan, Distributed PINN for linear elasticity – a unified approach for smooth, singular, compressible and incompressible media, International Journal of Computational Methods, Accepted, 2022.
12. LL Chen, H Lian, S Natarajan, W Zhao, XY Chen, SPA Bordas, Multi-frequency acoustic topology optimization of sound-absorption materials with isogeoemtric boundary element methods accelerated by frequency-decoupling and model order reduction techniques, Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, v395, 114997, 2022.