Onkar Sahni

Onkar Sahni is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). He is affiliated with the Center for Computational Innovations (CCI) and the Scientific Computation Research Center (SCOREC). His research focuses on Fluid Mechanics, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), Turbulence Simulations, and High-Performance Computing. His work spans plasma-material interactions in fusion energy systems, shock processing in aerodynamics, and anisotropic mesh adaptation for complex geometries.

Key research areas include development of GPU-accelerated particle-in-cell (PIC) codes (e.g., hPIC2), global impurity transport modeling (GITRm), and robust shock detection algorithms. Sahni’s contributions advance computational tools for fusion reactors, hypersonic flows, and unsteady aerodynamics. His methodologies emphasize parallel computing, unstructured mesh techniques, and machine learning integration.

His publications from 2022–2025 reflect a focus on fusion energy system simulations, hypersonic flow adaptation, and plasma dynamics. Recent work addresses tokamak impurity transport, meshing challenges in multi-scale PIC simulations, and AI-driven shock processing. Sahni collaborates on exascale computing projects and integrates open-source frameworks like SCOREC’s PUMI library.

Awards and grants are not explicitly listed in the provided materials. His advising and grants involve computational infrastructure development for industrial and academic partners. Sahni’s lab specializes in high-performance CFD workflows, with applications in aerospace engineering, renewable energy systems, and plasma physics.