Postdoctoral Researcher
E-mail: pratibha.biswal@ulb.be
Location: Campus Solbosch 165/41
Career Summary:
Pratibha Biswal earned her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from IIT Madras in 2017, focusing on natural convection, heatline analysis, and entropy generation in curved enclosures. She is a researcher and academic with over a decade of experience in thermal sciences, computational fluid dynamics, and energy systems.
She has held tenure-track faculty positions at leading Indian institutions and currently works at Université Libre de Bruxelles, where her research centres on digital twin modelling and furnace electrification. She is part of the HECO2 project group, working on the electrification of high-temperature furnaces. Her work bridges academia and industry through applied research, policy-relevant innovation, and interdisciplinary collaboration.
Her research portfolio includes turbine blade cooling, mist-assisted film cooling, and thermal energy storage. She has also contributed extensively to teaching engineering courses, supervising student projects, securing national research grants, and participating in curriculum development, academic planning, and industry-academia partnerships. She has taken on additional responsibilities in student affairs and faculty recruitment.
She has published over 30 peer-reviewed journal articles on turbine blade cooling, thermal energy storage, natural convection, and heat transfer in complex systems, as well as contributed book chapters on advanced energy systems and thermal management. She regularly attends international conferences and has published several conference proceedings.
She has been invited to speak at prestigious events, including the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (2014), the IIT Madras International Workshop on Mechanics of Energy Materials (2018), and the National Training on Multi-Hazard Risk Reduction (2022).
An active reviewer for more than 20 international journals in thermal sciences and energy engineering, she has also served as guest editor for special issues on thermal energy storage and computational fluid dynamics in Frontiers in Mechanical Engineering.
Her awards include the Best Paper Award at the 10th World Congress on Mechanical, Chemical, and Material Engineering (Barcelona, 2024) and the Oral Presentation Prize at the 5th International Conference on Advances in Energy Research (IIT Bombay, 2015).
She has chaired sessions at major international conferences, including the International Heat Transfer Conference (Japan, 2014), the MHMT Conference (Rome, 2019), and the MCM Conference (Barcelona, 2024).
Main Research Topics and Interests:
- Thermal energy storage
- Thermal management of turbine blades
- Electrification of industrial heat; Industrial decarbonisation
- Digital twins
- Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) in energy modelling
- CFD
- PINN
- Convection
- Turbine blade cooling
- Finite element method
- PCM
- Thermal storage
Involvement in Projects: