Dr. Amit Tandon, along with Tandon Lab members Debarshi Sarkar and Parth Sastry, and former PhD student Dr. Siddhant Kerhalkar, attended the third EKAMSAT (Enhancing Knowledge of the Arabian Sea Marine Environment through Science and Advanced Technology) update meeting on September 10-11, 2025. The meeting, hosted by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), was held at the ProteQ facility in Herndon, Virginia.

The two-day program featured a series of back-to-back sessions, where researchers from collaborating universities and institutes shared progress on topics ranging from basin-scale modeling and process studies to insights gained from the 2023, 2024, and most recent 2025 field campaigns.

Debarshi delivered a 12-minute presentation on the causes of spatial variability in air-sea heat and momentum fluxes, drawing on observations from the 2024 and 2025 campaigns. Parth presented his analysis of horizontal stirring along isopycnals using Argo float data in the Bay of Bengal. Dr. Kerhalkar, now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hawai‘i, presented part of his doctoral work on the influence of salinity stratification on diurnal warm layers, as well as plans for his upcoming postdoctoral research aimed at improving wave-based bulk formulations.

We are glad to announce that Ersen’s Joseph, a master’s student in the Tandon lab, successfully defended his master’s thesis on September 18, 2025. Ersen’s has been with the group since his undergraduate years and continued working with Dr. Tandon for his master’s degree. He took an appointment as a Mechanical Engineer in Dr. Tom Farrar’s group at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in May 2023, while continuing to work on his master’s thesis.

Ersen’s thesis explores how to mitigate vibrations caused by the shedding of vortices as fluid flows past a rigid object. His work specifically focuses on how the addition of spiral grooves to stretch hoses – used by engineers at WHOI to maintain ‘quiet’ conditions for underwater acoustics via subsurface hydrophones –  can reduce the low-frequency noise contamination caused by vortex-induced-vibration (VIV).

Ersen’s performed an extensive suite of 2D and 3D Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations using ANSYS Fluent to test the impact that various combinations of groove depths and helical pitches would have on the oscillatory (quantified by the RMS lift coefficient) and drag (quantified by the drag coefficient) forces. Guided by his advisor – Dr. Amit Tandon – and his committee, Dr. Hangjian Ling from the Mechanical Engineering Department at UMass Dartmouth and Dr. Tom Farrar, Senior Scientist at WHOI, his study provides crucial insight into VIV mitigation techniques, which is important in ensuring structural integrity in marine environments and accuracy of acoustic measurements.

Congratulations Ersen’s! We wish you luck in your work at WHOI and beyond!