IIT Hyderabad Project Assistant Recruitment 2026: CFD Analysis of Air Conditioner

IIT Hyderabad’s Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department has a single, focused opening — one Project Assistant position on a year-long CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) research project studying air conditioner airflow, run in partnership with Pusan National University and LG’s Global Cluster program. It’s a small notification compared to the government mega-drives on this site, but for a mechanical or aerospace engineering graduate with simulation skills, it’s a genuinely interesting research entry point — and unlike most listings here, the entire application happens through a Google Form rather than a government portal.

The position sits under a project titled “CFD Analysis of Air Conditioner — Second Year,” funded jointly by Pusan National University (South Korea) and LG’s Global Cluster programme, and led by Dr. Sachidananda Behera, Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at IIT Hyderabad. As the “Second Year” in the title suggests, this is a continuation of an existing research effort rather than a brand-new project starting from zero — which can actually work in an applicant’s favour, since there’s an established research direction and prior work to build on rather than starting completely from scratch.

The “1st Class” condition on your degree isn’t a suggestion here — it’s listed as an essential qualification, meaning candidates without first-class marks in their undergraduate engineering degree would not meet the minimum bar for this specific post, regardless of other strengths. Beyond that baseline, IIT Hyderabad has laid out a fairly specific desirable skill set that gives a strong hint about what the actual day-to-day work looks like:

None of these three are listed as mandatory, but candidates who can genuinely demonstrate even one of them — say, a final-year project that involved OpenFOAM, or coursework where you built and meshed a CFD model — will likely stand out considerably against applicants who only meet the bare B.Tech/B.E. threshold.

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Because this is a small, PI-driven research appointment rather than a large institutional recruitment, the process is much less formal than the government notifications typically covered on this site — but that doesn’t mean it’s less rigorous, just differently structured.

It’s easy to skim past a single-vacancy research post when you’re used to scanning notifications with hundreds of seats, but for the right candidate, a role like this can matter more for the CV line and the skill-building than for the fellowship amount itself. CFD work — specifically in HVAC and thermal systems — is one of the more transferable skill sets in mechanical and aerospace engineering right now, showing up in everything from automotive cooling systems to data-centre thermal management to, as here, consumer air-conditioning design for a major manufacturer like LG. A year spent running real simulations under faculty supervision, with an international university and an industry partner both attached to the output, is a genuinely different résumé entry than a year spent in a generic entry-level engineering job. If you’re weighing this against a private-sector offer, it’s worth thinking about which one builds the specific, in-demand skill set you actually want two or three years from now, rather than just comparing the monthly stipend on its own.

It’s also worth understanding, in plain terms, what FVM-based CFD analysis on an air conditioner actually involves, since the notification assumes you already know this going in. The Finite Volume Method breaks the space around and inside the air conditioner unit into a large number of small control volumes, then numerically solves the governing fluid-flow and heat-transfer equations across each of those volumes to predict how air actually moves, cools, and distributes itself. Getting a useful result depends heavily on two things: how well the mesh (the grid of those control volumes) is built around complex geometry like fins, vents, and internal ducting, and how correctly the boundary conditions and turbulence models are set up. That’s precisely why the notification calls out mesh generation experience as a distinct, separately desirable skill from general simulation experience — a candidate who can mesh well but hasn’t run full simulations, or vice versa, both bring real but incomplete value, and someone who can do both convincingly is likely to be the strongest applicant.

Unlike the large multi-stage online portals used by most Central and State recruiters, this application runs entirely through a Google Form. You’ll need to have the following ready as scanned/digital files before you start filling it in:

Since this process skips a written test entirely and goes straight from application screening to an online interview, that single conversation carries the full weight of the selection decision — there’s no separate score to fall back on if it doesn’t go well. Given that this is Year 2 of an ongoing project, it’s reasonable to expect the panel will want to gauge not just your base qualification but how quickly you could get productive on an already-running codebase and simulation setup. Being ready to walk through any final-year project or coursework involving fluid dynamics, heat transfer, or numerical methods — even if it wasn’t done in ANSYS or OpenFOAM specifically — will likely serve you better than only listing software names on a CV without being able to explain the underlying physics or the meshing choices you made. If you’ve used any CFD tool at all, even briefly, be ready to explain a specific case you worked on: what geometry you modelled, what boundary conditions you set, what turbulence model you used (if any), and what you actually learned from comparing your results to expectations or experimental data.