Pankaj Arvind Apte
Associate Professor
Department of Chemical Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur
India
Biography
Pankaj Arvind Apte is an Associate Professor in IIT Kanpur.
Research Interest
Our research focuses on thermodynamic aspects of phase transitions such as phase coexistence lines, free energy barrier of nucleation, and crystal-melt interfacial free energy. We have developed new simulation methodologies to calculate melting temperature and sublimation temperature of single component and binary systems. We aim to apply these techniques to complex molecular potentials to explore the effects of different molecular features on the phase diagram and to study the relative stability of crystal phases. We are also interested in the calculation of crystal-melt interfacial energy and its anisotropy. Our recent calculations indicate that anisotropy of crystal-melt interfacial energy of silicon plays a crucial role in Czocharlski method, which is a standard industrial method for the production of silicon crystals. Another area of interest is computation of free energy barrier of nucleation by density functional theory and Monte-Carlo simulation.
Publications
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. A. Apte, N. Pingua, A. K. Gautam, Uday Kumar, S. Y. Willow, X. C. Zeng, and B. D. Kulkarni, "The freezing tendency towards 4-coordinated amorphous network causes increase in heat capacity of supercooled Stillinger-Weber silicon" RSC Advances 5 (2015), 44679-44686.
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A. K. Gautam, Nandlal Pingua, Aashish Goyal, and P. A. Apte "Dynamical instability causes the demise of a supercooled tetrahedral liquid" Journal of Statistical Physics (2017), In press (DOI: 10.1007/s10955-017-1851-6)
