1. Introduction
Professor Kannahalli Narasimha Shastri Seetharamu, known to his colleagues and students simply as KNS, passed away on 16th January 2022 in Bangalore, India (Plate 1). A leading computational heat transfer expert, he transformed this area of research in India and elsewhere through his simplified approaches and the finite element method. He will be immensely missed by the enormous number of lives he touched over the past six decades. Below we provide a brief tribute to KNS’s scientific achievements.
2. Career
KNS received his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from Mysore University in 1960 before earning his master’s degree in power engineering and PhD in heat transfer, respectively, from IISc Bangalore in 1962 and the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM) in 1973 (advisor: Professor M.V. Krishnamurthy). After a brief stint in Industry and BIT Ranchi, KNS started his three decades of an academic career at IITM in 1968. He carried out research and taught engineering students from 1999 until his death in January 2022 at various universities, including University Sains Malaysia (1998–2005), MS Ramaiah School of Advanced Studies, Bangalore (2005–2006), Sri Bhagawan Mahaveer Jain College of Engineering Bangalore (2006–2007) and PES University, Bangalore (2007–2022). His close academic collaborators at IITM include Professors P.A. Aswatha Narayana and T. Sundararajan. KNS visited Swansea several times and developed a long-lasting collaboration with Professor Roland Lewis. His friendship with Professors Roland Lewis, Hywel Thomas and Ken Morgan lasted until his death this year. KNS had a strong research presence in and around Bangalore through his long service at PES university. At this institution, he established a solid thermal engineering group with the support of Professors T. R. Seetharam and V. Krishna. His student community (both formal and informal) is extensive and distributed around the world (the USA, the UK, Malaysia and India). Our sincere apologies for not being able to mention all names here.
3. Brief summary of achievements
During his career, KNS formally graduated 57 research students and informally helped many others to earn research degrees. He also published 455 articles, including 207 journal articles, with total citations exceeding 7,000. After a significant contribution to boiling heat transfer during his doctoral work (Seetharamu et al., 1972), KNS started working on the finite element method in the early eighties (Morgan et al., 1980; Sathyanarayana et al., 1983). The finite element research in heat transfer was significantly enhanced by his research visits to Swansea University and fruitful collaboration with senior academics in Swansea, including Professors Roland Lewis, Hywel Thomas and Ken Morgan (Lewis et al., 2004, 1996; Lewis and Seetharamu, 1995; Morgan et al., 1980, 1981; Murugesan et al., 2000; Nithiarasu et al., 2016; Usmani et al., 1992). KNS made significant contributions to a discrete system approach, a pre-cursor to the finite element method. He used this method in heat conduction, flow through pipe networks, heat exchangers and heat transfer enhancement (Chaudhuri et al., 1997; Parikshit et al., 2015; Ranganayakulu et al., 1997a, 1997b; Ranganayakulu and Seetharamu, 1999; Ravikumar et al., 1989; Kavadiki et al., 2015). He continued such a simple but effective approach to energy and momentum balance in various applications throughout his research career until recently (Ponangi et al., 2021; Kavadiki et al., 2016). Other notable contributions of KNS include computational fluid dynamics, heat, and mass transfer in porous media, drying, genetic algorithms and electronic cooling (Gowda et al., 1998; Jeevan, 2001; Murugesan et al., 2001; Nithiarasu et al., 1997; Parnaik et al., 1999; Quadir et al., 2000).
The authors immensely thank colleagues, friends, and students for organising meetings at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM) and PES University Bangalore.
