Shantanu Pawar / Second-year Mechanical Engineering
Grounded in physics.
Built for beyond.
I'm working toward a career in propulsion engineering.
Ten projects in, one small idea at a time.
A little curiosity.
A lot of thrust.
The person behind the projects
Hi, I’m
Shantanu.
A second-year mechanical engineering student aiming at propulsion engineering — and building toward it from every angle I can reach.
I’m at PVG’s College of Engineering, Technology and Management in Pune, India. Propulsion is the destination, not a single method: some weeks that's a plasma simulation, others a thruster's structural design, an embedded sensor gateway, or a machine-learned turbulence model. The throughline is the aim, not the tool.
For me, every project is a way of asking a better question. Then letting the work answer it.
Flagship research / VIOT
Small interactions.
Far-reaching
consequences.
A longer journey starts at the surface.
I created the Virtual Ion-Optics Testbed to investigate how carbon coatings affect erosion in the NASA NSTAR ion thruster. It connects the motion of a plasma to what happens when a single ion meets a surface.
Inside the research +
The study compares molybdenum grids with graphene and graphene nanoplatelet coatings. Nanoplatelets reduced simulated erosion, while monolayer graphene introduced an additional erosion channel. Field emission remains a critical tradeoff.
Everything else in flight
Seven threads.
One aim.
Propulsion engineering is the destination. These are the routes I'm testing to get there.
Virtual Ion-Optics Testbed
Carbon-nanomaterial coatings for ion-thruster grid erosion — GPU plasma simulation to molecular dynamics.
Active — Phase VPulsed N₂O Thruster Time Series
A physics model of a pulsed monopropellant thruster, forecast with an LSTM against an ARIMA baseline.
ICAETM 2026 submissionML Turbulence Closure
Tensor-basis neural nets vs. random forests for RANS closure, explained with spatial SHAP attribution.
ICMAI-MAC 2026Smart Ambulance Gateway
An ESP32 edge gateway that auto-detects medical BLE devices and triages data under bandwidth loss.
Verified end-to-end demoqsim-studio
A from-scratch, GPU-accelerated quantum simulator — statevectors, gates, and a QASM-2 circuit IR.
185 tests passingRocket Nozzle Throat Insert
Thermo-structural FEA of a C-103 nozzle throat insert — defect sensitivity at 1400°C.
ME301 courseworkProfNet
A local-first CRM for academic relationships — no cloud, no API keys, everything on-device.
ActiveHow I work
Follow the question.
Test everything.
Start with the physics.
Understand the mechanisms before choosing the model — the physics changes by project, the discipline doesn't.
Work across disciplines.
Simulation, embedded hardware, machine learning, structural analysis — whatever the question in front of me needs.
Make it reproducible.
Trace each result back to its parameters, assumptions, and verification. Keep the unexpected findings, too.
Back on Earth. Looking ahead.
Every mission starts
with a conversation.
Propulsion. Simulation. An interesting question.
Let’s see where it takes us.