Research profile R. (Ratnadeep) Pramanik

R. (Ratnadeep) Pramanik

Project: Computational Design of Soft Robots.

Miniaturized untethered soft robots find extensive use in biomedical and microfluidic applications due to their inherent compliance and bio-compatibility. Soft robotic micro-swimmers are fabricated using state-of-the-art additive manufacturing techniques and exhibit precise position control and untethered manoeuvring. Although experiments have been quite successful, there has been very little progress in the computational modeling of these soft robots and their intricate swimming dynamics due to the coupled non-linear interactions between the external magnetic field, the soft elastica and the surrounding viscous incompressible fluid medium. Standard Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) methods fail when there are large structural displacements involving mesh distortion and degeneration. Extended ALE methods are developed to address this issue wherein, variational mesh optimization and data-driven algorithms are used. The primary objective is to develop a robust computational framework using new ALE methods with non-degenerative meshes and efficient algorithms to overcome extensive mesh distortion, resulting in higher accuracy and predictability for modeling the coupled non-linear dynamics of magnetically-actuated soft robots swimming in a viscous incompressible fluid.

Keywords: Soft robots, Swimming dynamics, ALE methods, Variational mesh optimization, Data-driven algorithms

Fields of Expertise: Non-linear dynamics, Finite element modeling, Fluid-solid interaction, Numerical techniques, ALE methods