Vanka named ASME Freeman Scholar

Pratap Vanka has been named the 2012 Freeman Scholar by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Vanka, a professor of mechanical science and engineering, won this prestigious fluid mechanics award for his paper titled, “Computational Fluid Dynamics on Graphics Processing Units.” He will deliver a lecture at the ASME 2012 Fluid Engineering Division Summer Meeting in Puerto Rico.

A member of the Illinois faculty since 1989, Vanka research spans a number of areas related to computational fluid dynamics. These include transport processes in chemical vapor deposition (CVD) reactors, large eddy simulations in continuous casting of steel, microscale mixing, particle transport in turbulent flows and heat transfer in wavy passages.

As director of the Computational Fluid Dynamics Lab, his most recent contributions have been in CVD flow and transport processes. He investigated a geometry and parameter set that gives uniform deposition of the thin film on large diameter wafers-a process that may be of importance to the microelectronics industry.

The Freeman Scholar Program is supported by the ASME Freeman Fund and was established in 1926 by John R. Freeman, noted hydraulic engineer and scholar, honorary member, and 24^th president of ASME.
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Contact: Pratap Vanka, Department of Mechanical Science and Engineeirng, 217/244-8388.

Writer: William Bowman, associate director of communications, Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering, 217/244-0901.

If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, editor, Engineering Communications Office, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 217/244-7716.