About Me

[for quick response, use:
arunnnarasimhan AT gmail DOT com]

Arunn Narasimhan
Associate Professor
Room No. 105
Heat Transfer and Thermal Power Laboratory
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology Madras
Chennai, Tamil Nadu 600036, India

Office Phone: +91-44-22574696
Office Email: arunn AT iitm DOT ac DOT in
Official Webpage


Essentials: I am Arunn, a Faculty in IITM. My primary research interest for the past ten years is in modeling hydrodynamics and heat transport in porous media. Heat and fluid flow in biological systems and applications are my recent interest. I have also worked on thermofluids topics in convection, phase change materials and manufacturing processes in microlithography.

For more details see my research page. Publications page lists my peer reviewed journal articles. research notes discuss some of the recent research content and activities.

I contribute as a technical peer reviewer for thermal science related research journals including the International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, ASME Journal of Heat Transfer, ASME Journal of Fluids Engineering, Journal of Porous Media, Numerical Heat Transfer and the International Journal of Thermal Sciences

I support Open Science and Open Access Publishing. An introductory essay explains why. A subsequent essay dispels some myths surrounding open access and discusses ways to implement it in Indian academia.

Teaching: I have wanted to be a Teacher since my secondary school days and have been one for the past fifteen years. In the last six years I have taught courses like Thermodynamics and Heat Transfer for the undergraduates and Advanced Heat and Mass Transfer, Convection Heat Transfer and Measurements in Thermal Engineering for the graduate students. Heat and Mass Transport in Porous Media is a graduate elective I have been offering at the IITM for the past three years. I have also introduced Heat and Fluid Flow in Biological Systems as an elective course from Jan 2009. Browse the Notes page for related notes.

Worldline: My name is Arunn. Narasimhan is my father. Identification crisis – at least in the internet – exist even for Arunn, for which I could blame no one in particular. But Arun or Arun Narasimhan are definitely not me (or of my father).

I live in Chennai. I like Srirangam, my home town. I love Kodavasal, my birth place.

For the past six years, I am a Faculty in IITM. Before that I was Staff Research Engineer in the Microlithography Division of FSI International, Allen, TX, USA for about an year. My Ph. D. is from SMU, TX, USA, where I was a Teaching and Research Assistant between 1998 and 2002. Before that I was a Lecturer in Mechanical Engineering in SASTRA Deemed University, India for three years. My Masters degree in Engineering is from NIT, Trichy and Bachelor’s in Engineering from the Bharathidasan University, India. A while before that I was split between an egg and a sperm that got lucky.

Webline: To provide authenticity while sifting the Google search results that inevitably brings non-functional yet indelible cyber-print to the fore, here I list some of my functional internet indulgence.

I maintain a Notebook of explanatory essay-lets and short notes on eclectic topics written over the years. For a flavor, browse the Notes and Musings pages. I also write in Tamil language.

In the past, I have contributed to Zine5 and occasionally to blogcritics, desicritics and blogbharti.

I seldom leave comments in blogs or other internet forums. On the rare occasion when I do, it is usually under my name, polite and inconsequential.


The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful it would not be worth knowing, and life would not be worth living. I am not speaking, of course, of the beauty which strikes the senses, of the beauty of qualities and appearances. I am far from despising this, but it has nothing to do with science. What I mean is that more intimate beauty which comes from the harmonious order of its parts, and which a pure intelligence can grasp.
Henri Poincare
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