A controversial rocket scientist in India earned his fourth retraction in October after an investigation at a physics journal found a core part of his work was “inaccurate and paradoxical.”
At issue is a highly technical concept developed by V.R. Sanal Kumar, a professor of aerospace engineering at Amity University in New Delhi. Other scientists have denounced the concept, which Kumar has dubbed “Sanal flow choking,” as “absolute nonsense,” as we reported in April.
The editors of AIP Advances appear to agree. An October 9 notice announcing the retraction of “A closed-form analytical model for predicting 3D boundary layer displacement thickness for the validation of viscous flow solvers” stated:
Following publication, questions were raised regarding the soundness of the analytical model presented in the manuscript. Upon further investigation, the Editors of AIP Advances concluded that the model is flawed. The investigation revealed that the core model is inaccurate and paradoxical because it falsely ignores entropy increases in choked flows and combines two incompatible theories. The verification presented is also invalid due to the conflict between the premise and objective of the approach. As a result of these issues, the Editors no longer have confidence in the results reported in the article.
The paper has been cited 12 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
Kumar earned his first retraction last year, in Springer Nature’s Scientific Reports; two more followed in March in Wiley’s Global Challenges.
The researcher claims his ideas represent a “paradigm shift” and have applications in a wide range of fields and diseases. He has threatened legal action against editors and publishers for pulling his work, which he asserts could help protect “millions of lives,” as we reported earlier.
Kumar also opposes the latest retraction, according to the notice, but did not respond to an email seeking comment.
For our previous story, we contacted the editors of two AIP Publishing titles – AIP Advances and Physics of Fluids – that had published Kumar’s work. The publisher told us it would review our request “and the related material and comments.”
We also quoted Ganesh Natarajan of the Indian Institute of Technology Palakkad, who found it worrisome AIP Publishing hadn’t “really bothered to consider” complaints he had sent about Kumar’s papers.
In August, Natarajan told us in an email:
[Kumar’s] group continues to strongly publish based on this flawed idea in non peer-reviewed conferences (see for instance https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/6.2024-4598, but there are a couple of other works in the same conference as well as the LinkedIn post https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7225742187144052736/). The AIP Publishing team did contact me and informed me that they are looking into the matter following your story on RW, but it has been three months since then but there are no proactive actions or updates from them.
Following the October retraction in AIP Advances, Natarajan said the publisher had told him “the concerns on the Phys Fluids works are also being taken up with the Editors. I hope to see those papers retracted too.”
We asked AIP Publishing for an update about the three papers Kumar and his colleagues have published in Physics of Fluids. Wendy Beatty, director of content experience, told us:
We appreciate the whistleblower bringing this to our attention — AIP Publishing is taking the matter seriously. The publisher is reviewing this issue and the related materials in accordance with our policies. We will follow up with you when there is an update on our end.
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AIP Publishing and Physics of Fluids (in particular) should take it more seriously than they already are. Physics of Fluids was the first to be notified of the problems, way back in May 2022 and a dozen e-mails to the EiC highlighting the concerns never got a response. Of the half dozen ““”Comment” submitted to the journal critiquing the works of Kumar et al., most were not sent for review and others were desk-rejected. The couple of them that went for review was rejected, in just a day or two, based on a single cursory review that had no technical review comments either. Phys Fluids is a “specialised” fluids journal – and it has been nearly 30 months – yet they are unable to act upon what are relatively elementary blunders in that work. Blood boiling in human arteries and the gases going supersonic creating heart attack only requires simple commonsense – yet that is the core of one of the articles Phys Fluids has published and it is a “Review” nevertheless. Another “Review” claims to obtain exact solution for thickness of 3-D compressible boundary layers using 1-D approximate relations – it is obvious that the claim is meaningless, yet the article appears in a special issue commemorating hundred years of the “Karman-Pohlhausen Integral”. The irony is the integral approach is still the only way to “ “approximately” obtain the thickness for incompressible boundary layers over a simple flat plate – Kumar et al. claim they have found ways to get exact analytical solutions for more complex cases ! And the work on exact solutions directly builds on the AIP Advances work which is now retracted, so it is unclear as to how much more time and evidence is needed for Physics of Fluids to come to a resolution. Both surprising and disappointing, but hopefully this story from RW could be the catalyst that finally speeds up the resolution !