PhD student

I was born in 1991 in Haldwani, a small town in the beautiful state of Uttarakhand, which lies close to the Himalayas in Northern India. After completing my high school and intermediate college education, I moved south to the city of Pune. I obtained my BS-MS degree with a major in Physics from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Pune in 2014. For my master’s thesis (2013-2014), I worked as an intern at the Shell Technology Centre, Bangalore. My project involved studying methanation in Fisher-Tropsch synthesis using ab initio computational methods such as Density Functional Theory (DFT).

I started my Ph.D. at TU/e in June 2014, as part of the “Computational Sciences for Energy Research” (CSER) programme which is an industrial partnership between Shell and NWO. My research is focused upon multiscale simulations of phase separation and charge transport in organic solar cells. We have used coarse-grained molecular dynamics and a finite-element based phase field method to model phase separation triggered by solvent evaporation during spin-coating. Such simulations allow us to predict the optimum processing conditions needed to obtain a balanced morphology which will eventually result in a high efficiency organic solar cell. The charge transport simulations provide further insight on how individual material properties affect the device performance. The simulations are carried out using the kinetic Monte Carlo software Bumblebee, in close collaboration with Simbeyond.