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

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Department of Chemistry

Advanced Materials

Correction to: Biomimetic Electronic Devices for Measuring Bacterial Membrane Disruption (Advanced Materials, (2018), 30, 39, (1803130), 10.1002/adma.201803130)

This paper analyses the four-mecanum wheeled drive mobile robot wheels configurations that will give near desired performance with one fault and two faults for both set-point control and trajectory-tracking (circular profile) using kinematic motion control scheme within the tolerance limit. For one fault the system remains in its full actuation capabilities and gives the desired performance with the same control scheme. In case of two-fault wheels all combinations of faulty wheels have been considered using the same control scheme. Some configurations give desired performance within the tolerance limit defined while some does not even use pseudo inverse since using the system becomes under-actuated and their wheel alignment and configurations greatly influenced the performance. © 2019, DESIDOC.

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Fulltext

Defence Science Journal

Behavioural fault-tolerant-control of an omni-directional mobile robot with four-mecanum wheels

In this work, a new method of selective heating is proposed to increase the deformation behaviour of cylindrical sintered aluminium preforms during the process. Initially, cold upsetting is carried out using 0.5 MN hydraulic press machine at 0.1 s −1 strain rate and the failure locations of the preforms are predicted for various initial relative densities with the aspect ratio of 1 during the deformation process. After the prediction of this failure location, various conditions of selective heating are attempted uniformly on the deformed preforms after a certain stage of deformation before the onset of the failure initiation, using portable gas cartridge at a different temperature and time to assess their consequence on formability behaviour. The detailed experimental results are evaluated for the formability of the selectively heated preforms under different variables such as flow stress, relative density, axial strain, formability stress index and stress ratio parameter. As a result, the initiation of failure and its progression can be delayed by selectively heating the samples before the onset of the failure initiation. Selective heating of the failure location may relieve the accumulated stresses and delay the onset of failure to a later strain level thereby increasing the formability of the metal. © 2019, The Indian Institute of Metals - IIM.

Transactions of the Indian Institute of Metals

Effect of Selective Heating on Formability and Densification of Powder Metallurgy Preforms During Upsetting

The Aluminum alloy AA6061-4 wt% boron carbide (B4C) composites were fabricated by stir casting. The diesinker Electric Discharge Machining (EDM) was performed to create rectangular channels on fabricated AA6061-B4C composite. The Taguchi experimental design (L-9) with current (I), pulse-on (T-On) and pulse-off (T-Off) time as input parameters. The Material Removal Rate (MRR) and Average Recast Layer Thickness (ARLT) were considered as responses. The ARLT and surface topography of the machined zone were analyzed from the SEM micrographs. The regression model was developed and ANOVA was performed. Results that the current and T-On are significant parameters affecting the MRR and ARLT respectively.

Materials Today: Proceedings

Fabrication and experimental study to optimize the recast layer and the material removal in electric discharge machining (EDM) of AA6061-B4C composite

The present study investigates the machining performance of AlCrN and AlTiN coated cemented carbide inserts during end milling of MDN 250 maraging steel. The mechanical and metallurgical characterization is carried out to determine the properties of the PVD coatings developed. The end milling experiments under dry, wet and cryogenic environment is carried out using coated uncoated inserts (UC) at different spindle speeds to evaluate the machining performance in terms of tool life, surface roughness and cutting forces. The coated inserts showed higher tool life, better surface finish, and low cutting forces during machining at different spindle speeds. It is found that the AlCrN coating had a better wear resistance and machining performance in comparison with AlTiN coating. The cryogenic environment reduced the surface roughness & cutting force and improved the tool life of the cutting tool compared to conventional dry and wet environment. It is revealed that coated tools along with cryogenic cooling can be employed for high-speed machining applications. © 2019 The Society of Manufacturing Engineers

Journal of Manufacturing Processes

Investigation on the performance of AlCrN and AlTiN coated cemented carbide inserts during end milling of maraging steel under dry, wet and cryogenic environments

A monolithic solver based on a diffuse-interface immersed-boundary (IB) approach for conjugate-heat-transfer (CHT) problems is presented. The IB strategy assumes that the solid which is "immersed" into the computational grid is occupied by a "virtual" fluid to facilitate construction of "unified" governing equations that are solved everywhere in the domain. A unified momentum equation is devised using the solid volume fraction that reduces to the Navier-Stokes equation outside of the solid and to the no-slip boundary condition inside of it. The "unified" energy equation is constructed in an analogous fashion reducing to a convective-diffusive equation in the fluid domain and a fully diffusive equation in the solid domain with different thermal conductivities (or diffusivities) for both domains. The resulting equations are solved in both domains simultaneously using a hybrid staggered and nonstaggered finite-volume (FV) framework for incompressible flows. The second-order accurate IB-FV solver is employed to carry out investigations for CHT problems in natural and forced convective regimes. Numerical studies for different fluid-to-solid conductivity ratios show that the monolithic IB-CHT solver is a fast, simple, and accurate framework for simulations of CHT problems for Boussinesq flows. © 2019 American Physical Society.

Physical Review E

Diffuse-interface immersed-boundary framework for conjugate-heat-transfer problems

The microtubule-bound motors kinesin and dynein differ in many respects, a striking difference being that while kinesin is known to function mostly alone, dynein operates in large groups, much like myosinV in actin. Optical tweezer experiments in vitro have shown that the mean detachment time of a bead attached to kinesins under stall conditions is a slowly decreasing function of , while for dyneins, the time increases almost linearly with . This makes dynein a team worker, capable of producing and sustaining a large collective force without detaching. We characterize this phenomenon as 'temporal cooperativity' under load. In general, it is unclear which biophysical properties of a single motor determine whether it behaves cooperatively or not in a group. Our theoretical analysis shows that this is determined by two dimensionless parameters: (i) the ratio of single molecule, load-independent detachment and attachment rates and (ii) the ratio of the applied force per motor to the detachment force of a single motor. We show that the attachment-detachment dynamics of a motor assembly may be mapped to the motion of a hypothetical, overdamped Brownian particle in an effective potential, the form of which depends on the load-dependence of binding and unbinding rate of the motor. In this picture, the total number of motors is proportional to the inverse temperature and cooperative behaviour arises from the trapping of the particle in the minima of the potential, when present. In the latter case, application of results from Kramers' theory predicts that the mean time of escape of the particle, equivalent to the mean detachment time of the bead under stall, increases exponentially with the number of motors, indicating cooperative behaviour. If the potential does not have minima, the detachment time depends only weakly on , which suggests non-cooperative behaviour. In the large limit, the emergence of cooperative behaviour is shown to be similar to a continuous phase transition. © 2018 IOP Publishing Ltd.

Department of Physics

Physical Biology

Temporal cooperativity of motor proteins under constant force: Insights from Kramers' escape problem

The influence of the suspender on the evaporation of droplets under quiescent atmospheric conditions was studied experimentally using pendant droplets of ethanol (volatile) and water (non-volatile). Conducting and non-conducting suspenders of different materials and configurations (a steel needle, glass needle, steel rod and glass rod) were evaluated. For both liquids, it is observed that the rate of evaporation is higher with steel suspenders. More importantly, for ethanol droplets, there is a difference in the evaporation rates between the needle and rod configurations of the same material. Thus, it is shown for the ethanol droplet that the configuration (needle versus solid rod) also plays a role in the evaporation process, apart from the material. The water droplet does not show this dependence. Visualization of internal flow and heat transfer calculations explain this observation. The results will be useful in choosing an appropriate suspender while using the pendant droplet method for studying complex interactions in an evaporating droplet. © 2019 Elsevier Masson SAS

International Journal of Thermal Sciences

Influence of the suspender in evaporating pendant droplets

The authors wish to make the following corrections to this paper [1]: Two dot-plots in the Panel E of Figure 1 (labeled under VAP and VAA) have been inadvertently duplicated during the final preparation of figures. We would like to change the Panel E of Figure 1 in paper [1] to the correct version. © 2019 by the authors.

Biological Sciences and Engineering

Molecules

Erratum: Differential Effects of Viscum album Preparations on the Maturation and Activation of Human Dendritic Cells and CD4+ T Cell Responses (Molecules (2016) 21(912) DOI: 10.3390/molecules21070912)

The rodlet structure present on the Aspergillus fumigatus conidial surface hides conidia from immune recognition. In spite of the essential biological role of the rodlets, the molecular basis for their self-assembly and disaggregation is not known. Analysis of the soluble forms of conidia-extracted and recombinant RodA by NMR spectroscopy has indicated the importance of disulfide bonds and identified two dynamic regions as likely candidates for conformational change and intermolecular interactions during conversion of RodA into the amyloid rodlet structure. Point mutations introduced into the RODA sequence confirmed that (1)mutation of a single cysteine was sufficient to block rodlet formation on the conidial surface and (2)both presumed amyloidogenic regions were needed for proper rodlet assembly. Mutations in the two putative amyloidogenic regions retarded and disturbed, but did not completely inhibit, the formation of the rodlets in vitro and on the conidial surface. Even in a disturbed form, the presence of rodlets on the surface of the conidia was sufficient to immunosilence the conidium. However, in contrast to the parental conidia, long exposure of mutant conidia lacking disulfide bridges within RodA or expressing RodA carrying the double (I115S/I146G)mutation activated dendritic cells with the subsequent secretion of proinflammatory cytokines. The immune reactivity of the RodA mutant conidia was not due to a modification in the RodA structure, but to the exposure of different pathogen-associated molecular patterns on the surface as a result of the modification of the rodlet surface layer. The full degradation of the rodlet layer, which occurs during early germination, is due to a complex array of cell wall bound proteases. As reported earlier, this loss of the rodlet layer lead to a strong anti-fumigatus host immune response in mouse lungs. © 2019 The Authors