• Dr. Tarun Kant
  • Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay
  • 331 Randolph Hall
  • 3:00 p.m.
  • Faculty Host: Dr. Rakesh Kapania

The author will describe the fundamental research that he has been involved with on higher order plate/shell theories. Most modern structures are made of advanced laminated composite and sandwich materials to exploit their high degree of anisotropy and inhomogeneity across the thickness to reduce weight without sacrificing strength, integrity and durability.  In addition, to achieve optimum performance they are made of functionally graded materials (FGMs) that have continuously varying volume fractions of constituents to provide the desired functionality.  Due to the inhomogeneity in material properties, accurately modeling and designing these structures is very challenging, and has been intensely researched in the last four decades across the world and Professor Kant has made seminal contributions in this area, for which he is renowned internationally. Two dimensional (2D) plate/shell theories are developed to approximate deformation fields in real three dimensional (3D) structures that have one dimension much smaller than the other two dimensions.  Thus, some information in lost in this transformation of modeling of 3D structures with 2D approximate plate/shell theories. However, for designing them one needs accurate knowledge of stresses developed in the structure.  Professor Kant’s recent efficient and clever technique to accurately recover these stresses (e.g., see “A general partial discretization methodology for interlaminar stress computation in composite laminates, Computer Modeling in Engineering & Science 17(2), 135-161, 2007”) by the marriage of finite element (FE) and numerical integration (NI) techniques is considered to be first of its kind in the realm of elasto-statics.

Biography:

Born on 1 July 1946 at Ballia in Uttar Pradesh, he received his BSc degree from the University of Allahabad in 1962, his BTech (Hons) in civil engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay) in 1967 and MTech in civil engineering with specialization in structural engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IIT Kanpur) in 1969. He spent about one and a half year in a consulting engineering firm in Mumbai before joining IIT Bombay as a Lecturer. He earned his PhD degree while working as a Lecturer from IIT Bombay in 1977. He was selected as an Assistant Professor in 1978 and a Professor in 1986. He has held the positions of the Department Head (2000-2002), the Dean (Planning) of the Institute (2001-2003), the Chairman of the prestigious Joint Entrance Examination (JEE-1998) and the Chairman of the Central Library (1995-1999) with great distinction. The Institute appointed him as an Institute Chair Professor from 31st December 2009.

Professor Kant was elected a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE) in 1999, a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences (IASc) in 2004, a Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy (INSA) in 2007 and a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, India (NASI) in 2011. He is the first and only civil engineer in the country to get elected to all the four national academies. He was a visiting professor at University of Wales, Swansea (1979-’82), University of Cambridge (1993) and University of California, Los Angeles (2005).  He is a recipient of the Burmah-Shell Best Paper Prize. He was awarded the 1979 Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Trust (U.K) Scholarship and the 1992-’93 European Commission (EC) Senior Faculty Exchange Fellowship, both by the Government of India. IIT-Bombay, on 13 March 2007, conferred the 2006 Professor H.H. Mathur Award for Excellence in Research in Applied Sciences in recognition of his outstanding work in the area of Mechanics of Composite Materials and Structures. He also received the 2009 Khosla National Award for his life time achievement in the field of engineering. He is also a recipient of the 2010 IIT Bombay Research Paper Award. IIT Bombay, on 4th April 2012, conferred on him the 2011 Life Time Achievement Award. ICCS17 (17th International Conference on Composite Structures, Porto, Portugal, 17-21 June 2013) honoured him by calling him a legend and recognized him as a pioneer in initiating a new direction in mechanics of composites. Very recently he received the APACM Senior Scientist Award of the Asia Pacific Association of Computational Mechanics (APACM) on 12 December 2013 during APCOM2013 in Singapore and the ICCES (International Conference on Computational and Experimental Engineering and Sciences) Lifetime Achievement Medal in Reno, Nevada, USA on 20-24 July 2015 for making seminal contributions to composite materials and to the education of generations of students in India.            

He has published more than 147 research papers in refereed journals, 6 chapters in edited books, about 163 papers in conference proceedings, edited 4 books and currently serves on the editorial boards of 5 international journals. He has supervised 25 PhD theses and over 76 MTech dissertations. He has Research & Citation Standing in terms of h-index of 28 on Web of Science (35 on GoogleScholar). His current citations are over 2000 on Web of Science (over 4000 on GoogleScholar).