Vanka named ASME Freeman Scholar

Professor Pratap Vanka

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

Vanka 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 person of extensive experience in fluids engineering is selected as the Freeman Scholar,” according to ASME. “He is expected to review a coherent topic in his specialty, including a comprehensive statement of the state-of-the-art and to suggest key future research needs. The results will be presented at the International Mechanical Engineering Congress and published in the ASME Journal of Fluids Engineering.”

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.

Vanka joined the University of Illinois in 1989 and has been a full professor since 1993. He works in a number of areas related to computational fluid dynamics, including transport processes in chemical vapor deposition reactors, large eddy simulations in continuous casting of steel, micro-scale mixing, particle transport in turbulent flows, and heat transfer in wavy passages.