Department of Civil Engineering

Indian Institute of Technology Palakkad&nbsp;(IIT Palakkad or IIT PKD) is a public autonomous&nbsp;engineering&nbsp;and&nbsp;research&nbsp;institute located in&nbsp;Palakkad,&nbsp;Kerala. It was&nbsp;one of the five new&nbsp;IITs&nbsp;proposed in the&nbsp;2014 Union budget of India. The campus was inaugurated on 3 August 2015. The institute has 94 faculty, 978 students, and 63 non-teaching staffs.

IT Palakkad currently offers four-year Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) and two years MS programmes in 8 different engineering disciplines including&nbsp;Computer Science, Electrical, Mechanical, Civil among others.

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IIT Palakkad

World University root node

Advances in Engineering Education

Multiple Choice Versus Descriptive Exams for Direct Evaluation of Engineering Courses at University of Sharjah

Construction projects are ambitious in terms of the complexity in its components, structures, design requirements, information flows, stakeholder integration and technological integration particularly in green building projects. As a consequence, management of these projects becomes increasingly integrated; however, risk management has taken little account of these interdisciplinary and iterative trends. This leads to poor risk management outcomes, where traditional risk management practices that rely on allocating risks to specific individual entities are not able to accommodate the collaborative facets. Experienced practitioners were interviewed regarding their current practices and techniques towards managing interdependent design tasks that resulted in inseparable collective risks. Prospective utilization of Dependency Structure Matrices (DSM) and its analysis of identifying the existence of these collaborative Design Risks among the clusters of designs are proposed as a solution in this paper. Since the paper is explorative in terms of the application of the DSM method on identifying and managing the collaborative risk management in green building design, conceptual frameworks are only proposed.

Proceedings of the 20th International Dependency and Structure Modeling Conference, DSM 2018

Conceptual framework for collaborative risk management during the design phase of green building projects using DSM

Restoration of heritage sites from their remains is a challenging task, as the required geospatial and geophysical data are generally incomplete and complex in nature. These data are typically collected using multiple disciplines/techniques such as GIS, remote sensing, photogrammetry and ground penetration radar (GPR), to record and document factual and accurate information. This research proposes an integrated data collection and management practice towards achieving a structured archaeological documentation process with minimal or no damage to the existing structure. The process includes the integration of archaeological information from aerial stereo photographs, satellite images, global positioning systems (GPS) and GPR profiles. This approach is demonstrated through a fourth century ancient Greco-Roman city in Jordan (Umm Qais). Various abstract levels of details have been generated including orthophoto, digital elevation model (DEM) and vector site layout of buildings and infrastructure. Further, the GPR analysis shows the existence of shallow discontinuous and shifted buried walls, which indicates that the site was affected by a possible earthquake during the historical period. The developed 3D geospatial archaeological database for Umm Qais City can be utilised for various purposes such as archaeological documentation, conservation, monitoring, restoration, tourism and urban planning. The study also outlines the schedule of various processes and the cost estimate associated with the development of the integrated 3D geospatial archaeological database.

Applied Geomatics

Geomatics for economic archaeological documentation and management

Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur

Development of Asphalt-Rubber Gap-Graded Mixture Design: Laboratory Performance Investigations

Road network resilience is emerging as a vital planning criterion. Yet, unique and cross-comparable indices for road network resilience are scarce. One of the recent approaches determines resilience as a unique network attribute based on the system travel time at an upper envelope of operable disruptions. This upper envelope represents ‘critical states’ (or tipping points) of capacity disruptions. Critical state gives a bounding capacity degradation vector, beyond which the network cannot wholly cater to the origin–destination demand even under the best possible traffic assignment. However, solving the critical state identification problem (CSP) on real-scale networks has remained a challenge. This paper presents a weighted fictitious play algorithm to fill this gap. CSP has been previously envisaged as a two-player game between a network attacker and a network defender. Here, we make the players play iteratively, and make them learn from the competitor’s past strategies so that they converge to an equilibrium. We illustrate the method on a simple toy network, and solve it on different real-life networks. Resilience of the Anaheim city network was computed in 42.8 min., considerably outperforming—both in problem-size and solution-time—the previous, two-space genetic algorithm. © National Academy of Sciences: Transportation Research Board 2018.

Transportation Research Record

Algorithm to Compute Urban Road Network Resilience

Thin-Walled Structures

Damage to shallow tunnels in different geomaterials under static and dynamic loading

Stay cable systems are used extensively for the construction of long-span bridges owing to their inherent advantages. In most cable-stayed bridges the steel strands within the main tension elements (MTEs) are grouted to provide a corrosion protection system. However, there could be segregated grout, voids, and water accumulation/infiltration within these voids in the ducts due to poor quality of the grouting material and grouting techniques. These locations may act as initiators for the corrosion of steel strands within the ducts, which can have serious implications on the load carrying capacity and safety of cable-stayed bridges. In this investigation, several nondestructive evaluation (NDE) techniques are evaluated to determine their ability to detect grout defects within the anchorage regions, end caps, and MTEs of the stay cable system. Four stay cable specimen mock-ups with known grout defects and voids were fabricated. NDE methods that were part of this investigation included ground penetrating radar, infrared thermography, electrical capacitance tomography, impact echo, sounding, ultrasonic tomography, ultrasonic pulse velocity, low frequency ultrasound, visual testing, and borescope. While a few NDE methods could identify voids and water infiltration defects within the high-density polyethylene (HDPE) MTEs, it is evident that there is still a need for a method that is effective in detecting grout defects within the metal ducts embedded in the anchorage region and metal MTEs. Although visual testing and borescope methods are effective in identifying the defects, prior information about the location of the defects is generally required. © National Academy of Sciences: Transportation Research Board 2018.

Nondestructive Evaluation of Non-Strand Defects in Stay Cable Specimens

National Conference On Prospects &Retrospect in Engineering Geology …

Numerical Study of the Cross Sectional Shape of Shallow Tunnels Subjected to Impact and Blast Loading

Efficiency of fiber reinforcements to ensure the sealing efficiency of the landfill cap soil barriers so as to isolate the waste from the environment was demonstrated in the present study. Evaluation of hydraulic conductivity of soil barrier materials with different types of fibers, fiber dosage and fiber lengths are very important to ensure the sealing efficiency of the fiber reinforced soil barriers. An attempt was made to evaluate the hydraulic conductivity of the soil barrier material at a known effective stress using a flexible wall permeameter. Soil samples of 100 mm diameter and 100 mm height were prepared and tested in the present study. In all the cases, the hydraulic conductivity test phase was started after the completion of initialisation, saturation and isotropic consolidation phases of the soil samples. In the present study, seventeen (17) hydraulic conductivity tests were conducted on two different soil types for studying the influence of fiber content, fiber length and fiber type on the hydraulic conductivity of fiber reinforced soil. The fiber content, f used were 0.25%, 0.50% and 0.75% and the fiber lengths, l were 30 mm, 60 mm and 90 mm. Two types of fibers namely polyester (PET) fibers and polypropylene tape (PP-T) fibers were used for hydraulic conductivity tests. The repeatability of test results was also demonstrated. As the fiber content and fiber length were increased, initially there was a marginal decrease in hydraulic conductivity of the soil and thereafter marginally increased. Short fibers and low fiber contents were found to have greater influence in reducing the hydraulic conductivity of the soil and the variation was found to depend on the soil type also. Even with long fibers, the hydraulic conductivity of selected barrier material remained within the permissible limit required for a barrier material. The hydraulic conductivity of PP-T fiber reinforced soil is more, compared to hydraulic conductivity of PET fiber reinforced soil at all the fiber contents varied in the present study. The use of Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) is also attempted for the interpretation of the results. © 2017 Elsevier Ltd

Geotextiles and Geomembranes

Hydraulic conductivity behaviour of soil blended with geofiber inclusions

This paper provides a comprehensive review of literature on the properties of sugar industry waste, their varied uses in energy and construction sector, performance and limitations. An efficient upcycling of sugar industry waste in energy production would help the energy sector to reduce its dependency on non-renewable fossil fuels. Literature demonstrates that in the recent years there has been an increased research interest in thermochemical conversion of sugarcane bagasse to produce cleaner energy, rather than its landfilling or combustion. On the other hand, utilisation of secondary by-products from sugar industry in the production of cement, bricks, paver blocks, activated binder and other construction products helps to cut down the carbon footprint of the construction industry, while improving the properties of the final products. From the perspective of the sugar industry, such an arrangement eliminates disposal problems and creates additional revenue. Although independent research studies investigating the use of sugar industry by-products exist, few studies consider these valorisation options together to minimise waste and to create an efficient material flow chain. This study identifies various material and energy recovery pathways from published literature and connects the materials and processes to form a continuous material supply chain with minimum wastage. From the findings, a symbiotic framework has been developed with primary and secondary by-products from the sugar industry serving as source materials for energy production and sustainable construction products. © 2018 Elsevier Ltd

Journal of Cleaner Production

A circular framework for the valorisation of sugar industry wastes: Review on the industrial symbiosis between sugar, construction and energy industries