About

Poonkodi Sampath is an experienced CFD professional with a strong background in developing in-house, open source, and commercial tools. Currently, she works as a domain expert in Mercedes Benz R&D, where she focuses on developing computational strategies for side window soiling of cars. Before joining Mercedes Benz, Poonkodi worked as a Post-doctoral Engineer in the Research and Technology unit of Boeing, Bangalore. She focused on turbulence models and arrived at grid requirements for different turbulent models for industry-specific cases. During her doctorate, she independently developed and validated a 3-D Navier-Stokes solver for compressible high-speed flows. The solver is robust and efficient, and it can capture acoustics in high-speed flows. She also modified the solver for unstructured mesh inputs from Gambit so that complex geometries can be handled. Poonkodi has also worked on the development of a two-phase viscoelastic solver in OpenFOAM and successfully developed a two-phase viscoelastic solver for the coextrusion process. She has experience working with multiphase simulations (Eulerian and Lagrangian) in STARCMM+ for soiling applications of cars with a close collaboration with the development team of Siemens to attain the desired accuracy, that emulates wind tunnel testing and will eventually result in reduced prototype type testing. Apart from her technical expertise, Poonkodi has also tried her hand at entrepreneurship, where she proposed a software that caters to the market needs of the electric motor sector. She obtained letter of intents for collaborative work within a short span of time but had to shelve the project due to funding issues. Poonkodi holds a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Aerospace Engineering from IIT and a Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech.) in Aerospace Engineering from Anna University. She has relevant experience of 7.78 years and is always looking for challenging problems in fluid mechanics or CFD.