William Kumar Mohanty

Biography

William Kumar Mohanty is an professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at Indian institute of Technology Kharagpur.

Research Interest

I have been working in the area of Seismic Hazard Assessment and Seismic Microzonation studies of megacities and industrial cities in India. We have completed seismic microzonation for cities like Delhi, Kolkata, Haldia and Talchir and also did probabilistic seismic hazard analysis of some of the dam sites, industrial sites and nuclear power plants sponsored by government as well as industry. I am also working on the integrated geophysical technique more specifically gravity and magnetic methods for shallow surface investigation and locating mineral deposits. We have successfully identified Chromite deposits in the Sukinda belt and also identified possible Uranium deposits in the South Purulia Shear Zone to give a lead for exploration. In collaboration with ONGC, we worked on reservoir characterization. In the low to moderate seismicity areas like Talchir and Kolkata, where there is a sparse in seismic recordings, we used hybrid method which combines two computational techniques; modal summation and finite difference to produce multiphase synthetic seismograms. The estimated PGA, Response Spectral Ratio (RSR) as a function of frequency from scenario earthquake is the useful parameters for seismic microzonation.