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

The discovery of two-dimensional (2D) transition metal carbides and nitrides (MXenes) in 2011 has expanded the pool of nanomaterials available for a variety of applications. Characteristic properties of MXenes, such as high conductivity, hydrophilicity and catalytic activity have led to a growing research interest for their use in environmental remediation and water treatment applications. This review summarizes recent advances in the synthesis and applications of MXenes as adsorbents, desalination membranes, electrodes for electrochemical deionization and catalytic or antibacterial agents for water purification and other environmental remediation processes. The overview also features discussions on the computational attempts, biocompatibility and environmental impact in the exploration of MXenes for water applications, highlighting the challenges and opportunities of these advanced 2D materials.

World University root node

Biological Sciences and Engineering

Materials Today

Water treatment and environmental remediation applications of two-dimensional metal carbides (MXenes)

In this report, interlinked chitosan-ZnO nanocomposite at 10% ZnO (CZNC-10) is successfully used as green biocide for biofilm control and reduction of biocorrosion on carbon steel material. It was found that 250 $\mu$g/mL CZNC-10 can be used efficiently for the inhibition of sulfate reducing bacteria (SRB) biofilm on carbon steel. The Rct values after 21 and 28 days of incubation in presence of CZNC-10 are almost 3.2 and 2.8 times higher than the control respectively, indicating a strong corrosion inhibition with 74% as maximum inhibition efficiency.

Corrosion Science

Controlling the biocorrosion of sulfate-reducing bacteria (SRB) on carbon steel using ZnO/chitosan nanocomposite as an eco-friendly biocide

Here, a new decentralised approach-based wide-area back-up protection (WABP) scheme is proposed for faulted line identification (FLI). The scheme is divided into two sub-routines, i.e. possible faulted region (PFR) identification and FLI. Initially, the power system under study is divided into different coherent regions. The concept of centre of reactive power (CORP) is used to accomplish the task of PFR. Once the faulted region is identified, FLI is done by continuously monitoring the direction of reactive power flow (DORPF) of each line within the PFR. The proposed scheme is extensively tested on IEEE-39 bus test system for different types of faults. The performance of the scheme under stressed system conditions is also investigated. The obtained results show that the suggested algorithm is able to maintain the balance between dependability and security aspects of the protection logic. © The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2019.

Department of Electrical Engineering

Fulltext

IET Generation, Transmission and Distribution

Decentralised wide-area back-up protection scheme based on the concept of centre of reactive power

Sound Source Localization is the technique to exactly locate the position of a sound emitting source with the help of the audio data only. Its applications are audio surveillance, security monitoring where visual data is not available, robotics such as robots acting as a waiter, etc. It is also an initial stage of signal processing for the fields of speech enhancement, speech separation and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). Localization is usually carried out using array of microphones. The scenario of locating a sound source can be different such as single source localization, multiple source localization, moving source localization, source localization in noisy environment, etc. Extensive research progress is there in this field due to its multidimensional applications. This paper attempts to address some of the existing challenges in this field. Work in this paper deals with designing of a real-time, automatic target monitoring framework based on sound source localization. A comparative study of our results with other standard localization algorithm is also presented. The studies presented in this paper leads to the fact that the designed sound source localization framework is indeed low cost, small, real-time and able to locate multiple sources satisfactorily even in office environment where level of noise and reverberation is higher than standard anechoic rooms. © 2019 IEEE.

Proceedings - 2019 7th International Conference on Digital Information Processing and Communications, ICDIPC 2019

Design of a Real-Time Automatic Source Monitoring Framework Based on Sound Source Localization

This work investigates the application of zero-frequency resonator (ZFR) for detecting systolic peaks of photoplethysmogram (PPG) signals. Based on the authors' studies, they propose an automated noise-robust method, which consists of the central difference operation, the ZFR, the mean subtraction and averaging, the peak determination, and the peak rejection/acceptance rule. The method is evaluated using different kinds of PPG signals taken from the standard MIT-BIH polysomnographic database and Complex Systems Laboratory database and the recorded PPG signals at their Biomedical System Lab. The method achieves an average sensitivity (Se) of 99.95%, positive predictivity (Pp) of 99.89%, and overall accuracy (OA) of 99.84% on a total number of 116,673 true peaks. Evaluation results further demonstrate the robustness of the ZFR-based method for noisy PPG signals with a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) ranging from 30 to 5 dB. The method achieves an average Se = 99.76%, Pp = 99.84%, and OA= 99.60% for noisy PPG signals with a SNR of 5 dB. Various results show that the method yields better detection rates for both noise-free and noisy PPG signals. The method is simple and reliable as compared with the complexity of signal processing techniques and detection performance of the existing detection methods. © 2019 Institution of Engineering and Technology. All rights reserved.

Healthcare Technology Letters

Use of zero-frequency resonator for automatically detecting systolic peaks of photoplethysmogram signal

The design, development and characterization of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) based lateral single-pole-four-throw (SP4T) and single-pole-seven-throw (SP7T) switching networks are presented in this paper. Switches are fabricated using surface micromachining process on alumina substrate. SP4T and SP7T switches demonstrate measured average return loss of better than 22 dB and 12 dB, worst case average insertion loss of 0.3 dB and 5.89 dB at 3.5 GHz and 28 GHz, respectively. The average isolation is better than 22 dB up to 30 GHz. Switching networks are operational &gt; 1 billion cycles even with 1 W of RF power. Maximum fabricated switch (SP7T) area is ~ 0.89 mm2 including bias lines and pads. © 2019 IEEE.

2019 IEEE MTT-S International Microwave and RF Conference, IMARC 2019

Broadband, reliable and compact lateral MEMS SP4T and SP7T switching networks for 5G applications

A carrier based hybrid pulse width modulation (PWM) strategy for dual inverter with reduced switching loss is proposed in this paper. The proposed hybrid modulation scheme clamps each phase 60° continuously to the DC bus mid-point at all load power factors and results in reduced switching loss for lower modulation range. The hybrid scheme is obtained after comparing different combinations of level shifted and decoupled PWM methods based on average switching energy loss, current harmonic distortion, common mode and differential mode voltage switchings. All PWM methods are analysed on a dual inverter fed induction motor (IM) drive operated with open loop v/f control. From the analysis, it is observed that the proposed carrier based hybrid PWM scheme results in upto 20% reduction in switching loss as compared to the conventional bus clamping PWM methods for low speed operations. The hybrid PWM also has improved performance in terms of common mode and differential mode voltage switchings. The performance of PWM methods are experimentally validated on an open end winding IM drive. The PWM methods are generated using triangle carrier comparison with synchronous sampling. © 2019 IEEE.

2019 National Power Electronics Conference, NPEC 2019

Carrier Based Hybrid Modulation Scheme for Dual Inverter Fed Induction Motor Drive with Reduced Switching Loss

With the emergence of cloud radio access network (C-RAN) architecture, latency in fronthaul (FH) network is a critical performance metric especially for ultra-reliable and low-latency communication applications. The stringent FH capacity and latency requirements of C-RAN can be relaxed by offloading some baseband functionalities to remote radio unit (RRU), referred to as functional splitting. This allows packetized FH network solutions such as ubiquitous Ethernet. In this paper, we calculate the FH latency in the uplink of a C-RAN system with massive MIMO-based RRUs and 3GPP functional Split 7, wherein MIMO equalization is done at the RRU. We derive tractable, closed-form expressions for the steady-state probabilities of queue length and sojourn time distribution at the output port of an Ethernet switch in the FH network. We first present these results for Poisson file arrivals from users in the network and exponential file size distribution. We then extend the results to general file size distribution. The numerical results show that the file size and spectral efficiency of the users are critical in determining the FH latency. Further, results show that switch speed can be decreased without incurring significant increase in FH latency revealing the possibility for statistical multiplexing gains. © 2019 IEEE.

IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference, WCNC

Latency in the Uplink of massive MIMO CRAN with Packetized Fronthaul: Modeling and Analysis

Cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is a promising cellular technology in which a large number of distributed access points (APs) jointly serve a small number of user equipments (UEs). In this work, we investigate the impact of the spatial distribution of APs on the performance of a cell-free massive MIMO system, considering different downlink power control policies. Further, we analyze the performance for the case where only subsets of all APs serve the individual UEs: this scenario has lower backhaul requirements and associated CAPEX/OPEX costs. In this framework, we first propose a novel, tractable approximation for the average spectral efficiency (SE) of the transmission to a UE conditioned on the estimated channel gains. This approximation is then used to develop different downlink power control policies. Further, we extend the policies to the scenario when power control is coordinated only among subsets of APs and not across the subsets. Through extensive system-level simulations, we evaluate the improvement in SE by spreading out the APs and the SE loss when a subset of all APs serve a UE and coordination across subsets is absent. © 2019 IEEE.

IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference

Downlink power control in cell-free massive MIMO with partially distributed access points

Cloud radio access network (C-RAN) and massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) are two key enabling technologies for 5G as they improve radio performance while lowering the cost of operation. In a C-RAN system with massive MIMO-based remote radio units (RRUs), fronthaul is often the bottleneck in practice due to its finite capacity. To reduce the capacity requirements on fronthaul, precoding is done at the RRUs. In this paper, we maximize the energy efficiency (EE) of such a system by optimizing the transmit powers while explicitly incorporating the capacity constraints on fronthaul. We develop a successive convex approximation (SCA) algorithm, which is guaranteed to converge to a local optimum. Towards this, we propose novel bounds on the user rate function, which facilitates a convex approximation of the EE maximization problem. The convex problem is solved in each SCA iteration through Dinkel-bach's algorithm and dual decomposition. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm significantly improves EE compared to the case with no power control and outperforms the weighted minimum mean square error algorithm. © 2019 IEEE.