Satya Chakravarthy is a Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM), Chennai, India.
He received his Bachelor of Technology degree in Aerospace Engineering in 1991 from IIT Madras, and went to obtain his Master of Science in Aerospace Engineering degree in 1992 and Doctor of Philosophy in 1995, both from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA. After a post-doctoral stint at Georgia Tech, he joined the faculty of Aerospace Engineering at IIT Madras in 1997.
Satya Chakravarthy is interested in propulsion and combustion, and researches on different aspects of combustion in gas turbine, rocket engines, and electric aircraft.
• He heads the National Centre for Combustion Research & Development (NCCRD) at IIT Madras, the largest of its kind in the world, with a US$30 million funding over the last 10 years.
• Recently, he has also been heading the DRDO Centre of Propulsion Technology at IIT Madras.
Satya Chakravarthy was awarded the
• HAL Prize for the best undergraduate in aerospace engineering in 1991
• Young Engineer Award by the Indian National Academy of Engineering in 2003
• Young Faculty Recognition Award by IIT Madras in 2009
• Dalmi-HEMSI-ACRHEM Award by the High Energy Materials Society of India in 2009
• DRDO Academic Excellence Award by the Defence Research and Development Organization twice, in 2009 and 2016
• Deep-Tech Enabler Award by TiE-Chennai in 2022.
Satya Chakravarthy is
• the Founder and Technical Lead of The ePlane Company, a startup company aiming to make a new breed of aircraft called hybrid aerial vehicles for vertical takeoff and landing as well as long distance flight to carry goods and passengers, leading to air taxi operations
• Director of Agnikul Cosmos, a startup company aiming to make mini launch vehicles to launch micro- and nano-satellites into space orbits
• Director of Aerostrovilos, a startup company aiming to produce fuel agnostic micro gas turbines for decentralized power generation including onboard hybrid electric trucks
• Director of X2Fuels & Energy, a startup company aiming to convert any kind of wastes—municipal solid wastes and agri wastes—into crude oil
• share-holding Advisor to GalaxEye, a startup that aims to make earth observation satellites with multi-sensor fusion and edge-computing in space.
• Faculty mentor of the Team Avishkar Hyperloop student team at IIT Madras, and is now part of TuTr Hyperloop, a startup company to commercialize the technology
• Advisor to NewTrace, which aims to make green hydrogen at an affordable cost soon.
• He has delivered invited talks titled “Ubiquitous Flying” at the Mahindra Technical Academy on their Great Ideas for Tomorrow (GIFT) programme and at Amadeus on their aGeek programme.
• His web presence includes TedX talks, one on “India’s Space Programme” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lGiLzsNS24 and more recently, another on a topic titled “Defrastructure” (http://progressvideo.tv/videos/democratizing-technology-through-defrastructure-dr-satyanarayanan-chakravarthy-tedxnittrichy)
• besides his 55 lectures on a graduate level course on Combustion on YouTube through the National Programme on Technology Enabled Learning (NPTEL)
• and the first-of-its-kind-in-the-world semester long course on Electric Aircraft Propulsion, video-recorded through November 2019 (to be uploaded on YouTube).