CV | Prasanna Thoguluva Rajendran

CURRICULUM VITAE

Prasanna Thoguluva Rajendran · Ph.D. Student in Aerospace Engineering

Computational Multiphase Transport Laboratory, Department of Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering, University of Arizona · DRL-CFD Researcher | Active Flow Control

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Education

Ph.D., Aerospace Engineering · University of Arizona, Tucson, USA
Jan 2021 – Present
Ph.D. student in Aerospace Engineering.
M.S., Aerospace Engineering · Pusan National University, Busan, Republic of Korea
Aug 2018 – Aug 2020
Graduate research in aerospace engineering.
B.E., Aeronautical Engineering · Kumaraguru College of Technology, Coimbatore, India
Jul 2013 – Apr 2017
Undergraduate training in aeronautical engineering.

Research Focus

Active flow control with reinforcement learning
High-order discretizations (DG/FR, spectral element)
High-performance computing for CFD and control pipelines

RESEARCH EXPERIENCE

Research appointments and project responsibilities.

Computational Multiphase Transport Laboratory, Department of Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering, University of Arizona

Graduate Research Assistant · Sep 2023 – Present

Prof. Farzad Mashayek

Developed CFD-in-the-loop control workflows to discover active flow control strategies using deep reinforcement learning for airfoil pitching moment regulation.
Designed and developed TorchRL/Stable-Baselines3-coupled PyFR workflows for experimentation and reproducible DRL-CFD training runs.
Led an under-review Computers & Fluids manuscript showing DRL-based AFC trim control on NACA0012 ( $\mathrm{Re}_c=3000$ ), including reward-design analysis for mean versus instantaneous pitching-moment regulation.

Computational Plasma & Reactive Flow Laboratory, University of Arizona

Graduate Research Assistant · Jan 2021 – Jul 2023

Prof. Bernard Parent

Validated in-house numerical simulation code for non-neutral plasma and sheath-dominated flows via verification and cross-model comparisons.
Studied plasma sheath and MHD force interactions for aerodynamic braking concepts and quantified electron losses in hypersonic flows.
Compared air-plasma transport-coefficient models and assessed effects on plasma density and electrostatic probe currents.
Contributed to CFDWARP development by accelerating distributed MPI communication in core solver loops, improving reliability of parallel workflow operations, and extending thermodynamic and transport coefficient models, chemical-kinetics models for plasma-flow simulations.

Applied Aerodynamic Design Laboratory, Pusan National University

Graduate Research Assistant · Sep 2019 – Dec 2020

Prof. Park Donghun

Performed adaptive-order implicit LES of turbulent supersonic boundary layers and analyzed disturbance growth and instability amplification.

TECHNICAL SKILLS

Research software and computational tooling.

Languages

C
C++
Fortran
Python
MATLAB
CUDA C

CFD

ML

Reinforcement learning for active flow control
TorchRL/Stable-Baselines3 + PyFR coupled workflows

AI-Assisted Programming

OpenAI Codex
GitHub Copilot

HPC

MPI
OpenMP
CUDA
Slurm

Visualization

Selected Projects

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Airfoil Pitching Moment Control
Under-review Computers & Fluids manuscript on PPO-based DRL control of a NACA0012 airfoil ( $\mathrm{Re}_c=3000$ , $\alpha=10^\circ$ ) for quarter-chord pitching-moment trim using CFD-in-the-loop active flow control.
TorchRL/Stable-Baselines3 + PyFR Coupled Control Framework
Research software framework for parallelized RL-CFD experiments with reproducible training, rollout, and evaluation workflows.
Modal Analysis of Turbulent Flows Simulated with Spectral Element Method
Collaborative study on modal characterization in turbulent flows, connected to high-order numerics and analysis workflows.
Effect of Transport Coefficients on RAM-C-II Plasma Density
Prior work on plasma-density sensitivity to transport-coefficient choices in high-speed flow simulations.

Publications (Selected)

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Airfoil Pitching Moment Control
Computers & Fluids (AI and Fluid Mechanics Symposium special issue) - DRL-AFC trim control for NACA0012 at $\mathrm{Re}_c=3000$ · 2025 · In Review
Modal analysis of turbulent flows simulated with spectral element method
Physics of Fluids 36(12):125164 · 2024 · Published
Effect of Transport Coefficients on RAM-C-II Plasma Density
AIAA SciTech 2023 (AIAA 2023-2054) · 2023 · Published
Effect of Local Thermal Strips on Hypersonic Boundary-Layer Instability
Computers & Fluids 257:105868 · 2023 · Published
Electron Losses in Hypersonic Flows
Physics of Fluids 34:016110 (Editor's Pick) · 2022 · Published

Teaching

Teaching Assistant · Aug 2021 – Present

Numerical Methods in Fluid Mechanics and Heat Transfer
Computer Programming in Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
Engineering Fluid Mechanics
Gasdynamics
Aerospace Propulsion
Aircraft Performance
Dynamics of Machines

Certification

NVIDIA: Fundamentals of Accelerated Computing with CUDA C/C++
June 2023
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Additional

HPC cluster assembly and maintenance