VIT students’ book on wildlife conservation

The book, Airflow, Comfort and Habitability of Game Reserves, was written by Dhruv Gangadharan Arvind and co-authored by his guide Prof Satyajit Ghosh and college senior Siddhartha Mukherjee, the lead photographer. 

Talking about his motivation for writing the book, Arvind said, “I felt it was my responsibility to incorporate latest technologies in the conservation of wildlife and aid the perpetuity of nature. I wanted to use Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to examine fluid flows in the natural habitats of tigers at the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve, Tamil Nadu and Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya.”

The book, accompanied by photographs, says comfort levels of these big cats in their habitats could be ascertained by defining a value known as Predicted Mean Vote (PMV); the habitability of the natural reserves was determined on a scale from -3 (very cold) to +3 (very hot) with 0 being neutral.

This is done using advances in CFD through applied mathematics and fluid dynamics and ENVI-met Version 4, a microclimatic model to simulate areas of interest spatially and temporally in view of biometeorology, a press release from VIT said.