Dr. Noor Afzal, Emeritus Fellow (AICTE) at Zakir Husain College of Engineering and Technology, Aligarh Muslim University, has accused 27 professors from USA (15), China (3), Germany (4), Israel (1), Australia (2) and UK (2), of plagiarising his original work on ‘turbulent motion of fluids’ – an area of research which has a wide application in anything that moves. Nobel Laureate 1965 Richard Feynman described turbulence as “the most important unsolved problem of classical physics”.
Afzal and his group have lodged an FIR at Civil Lines Police Station, Aligarh against these 27 Professors. He accused Dr. Fazle Hussain (distinguished professor of USA), Dr. Zhen-Su She (distinguished professor of USA and currently in China), Dr. You Wu and Dr. Xi Chen (in Beijing) of continually using his research findings and work as their own. Prof Afzal has pointed out that they are pretending as if they are not aware of the work of Afzal and his group that has been regularly appearing in the best journals of USA and UK since 1982. When their attention was drawn by providing the facts, they are not responding, he added.
“Dr. Fazle Hussain, Professor at Mechanical Engineering Department, University of Houston, Texas and Dr. Zhen-Su She, Professor at Peking University, adopted simple changes in our work and got it published as their own in the New Journal of Physics. Not only this, they have been plagiarising our work for past few years and getting it published,” says Prof Afzal.
Other Professors who are continually using his research findings as their own figured on plagiarism about work on intermediate (mesolayer) proposed during 1982-1985 (after 1930 two layers discovery by Ludwig Prandtl and T.V. Karman) in the turbulent shear flows. His accusation list includes the distinguished Professors of USA, namely: (with effect from onwards) wefo 1987 K R Sreenivasan, Anupam Sahay, A. Bershadskii, Ronald A. Panton; wefo 2003 M. Gad-el-Hak; wefo 2005 J C Klewicki, P. Fife, T. Wei, P. McMurthy, R. Ebneri, D. Maynes, T. Ameel; wefo 1998 A.J. Smits, M V Zagarola, B. J. McKeon, M. Metzger, M. Hultmark; wefo 2007 Thomas S. Lundgren, Germany; wefo 2003 M H Buschmann, K Gersten, Jorg Kluer, Heinz Herwieg Australia, UK; wefo 2004 J.F Morrison, A.S. Sharma; wefo 2007 Ivan Marusic, J.P. Monty, etc.
K R Sreenivasan (1989) and Gad-el-Hak (2000) monographs have further caused interference in IPC by assigning the work of Afzal (1982) to A V Johansson, and P H Alfredson (1982) who have not even talked about it. During 2012 Todd A Oliver of Robert D Moser of US assigned the generalised log law to M. Gad-el-Hak and M H Buschmann (2003) instead of original work by Afzal (1973, 1976, 1985) group.
According to Prof. Afzal, this plagiarism is a clear violation of terms and agreement reached by USA and India through Technology Safeguards Agreements , 2009, which safeguards and protects technologies and data of both countries, signed by the Secretary of United States, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Indian Minister of External Affairs, SM Krishna. Moreover, plagiarism is considered a literary theft, academic dishonesty and an extremely immoral act in the realm of academics.
Afzal group’s work has been published in reputed journals in USA, UK etc. and has been acknowledged. Paul S Granville, in the Journal of Ship Research, in 1987, acknowledged Afzal’s and Narasimha’s landmark work on the drag of cylindrical missiles, stating that “the classical logarithmic law was considered well established both theoretically and experimentally”. The Infringement on IRP by a very large number of persons has been published by Afzal in Journal Heat Transfer Transaction ASME (2008, 2009) and Canadian J. Civil Engineering (2013). Afzal and his group have come out with three detailed reports that deal with the relations proposed by them and the corrections to plagiarism of their work on internet website sites.google.com/site/noorafzal/.
It is a matter of great concern that in this age of IPR, the innovative, original research work of an Indian Professor and his group is being falsely claimed by scholars across the world.
Afzal and his group have also urged the government of India to take up the case with an appropriate global body and set the records right, as the creditable and landmark research work legitimately belongs to India. The work showcases the spirit of enterprise in highly specialised domain of scientific theory and application of revolutionary nature in the extremely valuable domain of turbulent motion of fluid which is also a vital domain of missile technology.