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.

&nbsp;

IIT Palakkad

The design and construction on infrastructure projects were earlier done in sequence. However, the rapid rise in the infrastructure requirements and accelerated project schedules produced tremendous pressure on the construction organizations to adopt concurrent and fast-track techniques. This resulted in suboptimal utilization of resources and increased wastes to meet the schedule in the construction and design phases. Lean principles are used to plan the wastes reduction in the construction phase which was a common demand in the past. Research studies show that the design phase has more impact on the overall project planning and wastes reduction than the subsequent phases. Many methods have been devised to plan the design phases. Of these, the Design Structure Matrix (DSM) has shown a lot of application potential. This paper discusses a server based DSM tool called 'diMs' implemented on a design project to achieve lean design through managing the processes. The paper also discusses the waste reduction using 'diMs' tool compared with the conventional design practices with an example case study.

World University root node

Proceedings of IGLC17: 17th Annual Conference of the International Group for Lean Construction

Achieving lean design using design interface management tool

The quantification of stream flow in ungauged basins is one of the most challenging tasks in surface water hydrology due to non-availability of data and system heterogeneity. Even though physics based distributed hydrologic models are considered best suited for the ungauged basins, uncertainty in model simulations, in the absence of any parameter estimations reflecting accurate watershed characteristics, may be high. A successful application of these models in making hydrologic response predictions in ungauged basins requires reducing number of parameters and output uncertainty. The current study proposes a method to minimize the predictive uncertainty of distributed hydrological models by deriving regionalized probability distribution of sensitive parameters of the model. To facilitate stochastic validation of the model in ungauged basins, the derived PDF of the parameters are obtained for a number of gauged basins, the derived PDFs are regionalized and then transferred to the ungauged basin. The method is illustrated through a case study of SWAT model applied to a watershed.

American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers Annual International Meeting 2009, ASABE 2009

Regionalization of parameter probability density function of distributed watershed models for their application in ungauged basin simulations

This paper presents two formulations for material discontinuity modeling in the element-free Galerkin method. The proposed methods involve an element-free Galerkin formulation in conjunction with two types of transformation methods which relate the nodal parameters and their corresponding physical nodal values to treat the material discontinuities in elastic bi-materials. The proposed methods eliminate the shortcomings of existing methods like Lagrange multiplier method, discontinuity enrichment method and penalty method typically used for material discontinuity treatment in element-free Galerkin formulations. Numerical examples show that the proposed methods yield accurate estimates of solutions.

Journal of Structural Engineering (Madras)

On material discontinuity modeling in element free Galerkin method

DSM can be formulated to capture dependencies at various design levels such as component, team, activity, parameter etc (Browning, 2001). Typically, the design scheduling and design sequencing has been done using the activity based DSM. As activities can be defined at many levels, finding the suitable level of abstraction to formulate the Activity DSM was difficult. Hence a modified methodology was felt necessary. The formulation of Drawing DSM (DDSM) and its use for design sequencing forms a key aspect of design management. However, the designers cannot formulate the DDSM directly as its size is large and requires significant investment in the designer's time. Hence, a modified DDSM formation methodology called 'Design Interface Management System (diMs)' has been proposed from the field studies (Senthilkumar and Varghese, 2009). To encourage the utility, an automated server based tool has been developed based on the 'diMs' methodology. The tool is implemented in an airport project. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the applicability of DSM concepts in fast-track construction projects through 'diMs' implementation and to propose suggestions for the DDSM application in fast-track projects.

Proceedings of the 11th International DSM Conference

Drawing DSM implementation in construction design-discussions on applicability

9th National Conference on Technological Trends

Effect of Confinement in Improving the Load Carrying Capacity of Soft Soils

Kerala Environment Congress

Biomedical Waste Management - A Case Study

In the stochastic mechanics community, the need to account for uncertainty has long been recognized as key to achieving the reliable design of structural and mechanical systems. It is generally agreed that advanced computational tools must be employed to provide the necessary computational framework for describing structural response. A currently popular method is the stochastic finite element method (SFEM), which integrates probability theory with the standard finite element method (FEM). However, SFEM requires a structured mesh to perform the underlying finite element analysis. It is generally recognized that the creation of workable meshes for complex geometric configurations can be difficult, time consuming, and expensive. This discrepancy is further exacerbated when solving solid mechanics problems characterized by a continuous change in the geometry of the domain under analysis. The underlying structures of these methods, which rely on a mesh, are cumbersome in treating moving cracks or mesh distortion. Consequently, the only viable option when applying FEM is to remesh during each discrete step of the model's evolution. This creates numerical difficulties, even for deterministic analysis, and often leads to degradation in solution accuracy, complexity in computer programming, and a computationally intensive environment. Consequently, there is considerable interest in eliminating or greatly simplifying the meshing task. In recent years, a class of Galerkin-based meshfree or meshless methods have been developed that do not require a structured mesh to discretize the problem, such as the element-free Galerkin method, and the reproducing kernel particle method. These methods employ a moving least-squares approximation method that allows resultant shape functions to be constructed entirely in terms of arbitrarily placed nodes. Meshless discretization presents significant advantages for modeling fracture propagation. By sidestepping remeshing requirements, crack-propagation analysis can be dramatically simplified. Since mesh generation of complex structures can be far more time-consuming and costly than the solution of a discrete set of linear equations, the meshless method provides an attractive alternative to FEM. However, most of the development in meshless methods to date has focused on deterministic problems. Research into probabilistic meshless analysis has not been widespread and is only now gaining attention. Due to inherent uncertainties in loads, material properties and geometry, a probabilistic meshless model is ultimately necessary. Hence, there is considerable interest in developing stochastic meshless methods capable of addressing uncertainties in loads, material properties and geometry, and of predicting the probabilistic response of structures. This paper presents a new stochastic meshless method for predicting probabilistic structural response of cracked structures i.e., mean and variance of the fracture parameters. Copyright © 2007 by ASME.

American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Pressure Vessels and Piping Division (Publication) PVP

Stochastic meshfree method for computational fracture mechanics

A stochastic meshless method is presented for solving boundary-value problems in damage mechanics under elastic-plastic conditions that involves random material properties. Material is assumed to have an initial damage, which follows a lognormal filed. An isotropic unified damage law, formulated by Lemaitre is used in this study. A meshless formulation based on element free Galerkin method (EFGM) is developed to predict stochastic structural response. A scaled matrix approach is used for applying the essential boundary conditions in EFGM. The proposed method is based on perturbation technique. First order perturbation technique for damage growth in an elastic plastic analysis is formulated. Newton-Raphson algorithm is used to solve for material nonlinearity. A numerical example is solved to study the effect of random initial damage in the structural response and further damage growth. Monte Carlo technique is used to validate the proposed method. © 2008 by ASME.