Prof. Arnab Banerjee

IIT Delhi

Dr. Arnab Banerjee has been serving the Civil Engineering Department of IIT Delhi as Assistant Professor, grade-I since March 2021 and as Assistant Professor, grade-II since May 2019. He started his professional career as an Assistant Professor, grade-II at IIT Jammu in August 2018. Dr. Arnab Banerjee earned his Ph.D. from the Mechanical Engineering Department of the University of Auckland, New Zealand in March 2018 for his research on Nonlinear Mechanical Metamaterial. Before that, he received M.Tech and B.Tech degrees in Structural Dynamics specialization from the Earthquake Engineering Department of IIT Roorkee in 2013 and Construction Engineering from Jadavpur University in 2011, respectively.

Dr. Banerjee is a multidisciplinary researcher do actively researches a broad spectrum of topics encompassing structural dynamics, wave mechanics, and new and renewable energy. Dr Banerjee’s research primarily focuses on designing and analysis of metamaterials towards wider band mechanical filters, and their application for real-life structures for enhanced vibration control. Till now, the use of metamaterials in the following fields, i.e., (i) vibration control of the wind turbine tower and tall building, (ii) acoustic and seismic performance enhancement, (iii) railway noise and vibration mitigation, and (iv) enhanced energy harvesting, were investigated by Dr Banerjee. Dr Banerjee’s research is not restricted to the theoretical computation and designing of metamaterials, but rather extended towards the physical realization, prototyping, and lab-scale experimentation of the metamaterial-impregnated structures and structural components. The internal architecture of a metamaterial’s unit cell results in extreme frequency-dependent engineering properties such as inertia amplification, negative mass, negative stiffness, etc. Dr Banerjee investigated dispersion relationship, and attenuation profile for several different forms of metamaterial. The realization of two peaks in the subwavelength attenuation band of a chain of the inertial amplifier due to the coupling of negative mass and stiffness is one of the prime contributions of Dr Banerjee. Another significant contribution of Dr. Banerjee in the field of nonlinear metamaterial is the identification of zero effective mass in an impacting metamaterial chain owing to the compulsory momentum balance during impact. Dr Banerjee and his collaborator applied active control within the mass-in-mass metamaterial and successfully obtained an ultra-wide bandgap theoretically. Dr Banerjee analytically quantified the bandwidth of a beam having several periodic attachments, such as a spring-mass resonator, torsional oscillator, and aperiodic resonator.

Dr. Banerjee extensively works on the clean and green renewable energy sector, specifically on the analysis and design of offshore and onshore wind turbine piles and towers, their blades, solar panel mounting structures, etc. Recently exploring the edge-state phenomenon of periodic lattice and inertial amplification Dr. Banerjee and his collaborators have enhanced the bandgap and energy harvesting level from wave energy significantly. His research has significantly contributed to our understanding of bandgap generation, wave attenuation, non-reciprocity, active metamaterial, nonlinear metamaterial, meta-damping, and energy harvesting. Moreover, his work and contributions have garnered widespread acclaim and have been published in reputable scientific journals, making a lasting impact on the scientific community. To complement his theoretical research work, Dr Banerjee has also started realizing the metamaterial properties experimentally, which indeed is quite demanding and at the same time outcomes thereof are immensely useful for future applications. Dr Banerjee has successfully completed several funded research projects and applied for patenting the concepts evolved through his research. Dr Banerjee is also working on railway vibration abatement/ reduction and renewable energy aligned with the national mission of India.

Dr. Banerjee is also involved in consultancy projects related to vibration control, structural health monitoring, seismic performance evaluation of buildings, dams, and bridges, and their retrofitting and rehabilitation.

Dr. Banerjee received the following recognition:

INAE Young Associate from the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE) in 2023.
Invited speaker in Phononics-2023 at Manchester, UK.
Inspire Faculty Award from the Department of Science and Technology (DST) India on 2018.
Newton International postdoctoral Fellow from Royal Society London on 2018.
In the top 2% of researchers for citations in last year's 2023 list published from the University of Standford.
Best research paper award in 6th International conference on Computational Mechanics (ICCM), at Auckland on 2014.

NOC: Structural Dynamics: Theory and Computation, IIT Delhi