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 jet impingement heat transfer is a well-established technique for obtaining high heat transfer rates for many cooling and heating applications. Impingement heat transfer methods are widely used in domestic and industrial appliances. The impinging isothermal gas jets are used for both heating and cooling. However, premixed flame jets are used for heating the target surface. Present study is an attempt to compare the heat transfer characteristics of the isothermal air jets and premixed flame jets. The isothermal air jet having jet temperature of 30 °C (cold jet or ambient temperature jet), 100 °C (hot jet), and premixed methane-air flame jet (stoichiometric mixture) with Reynolds numbers of 500, 750, 1000, 1250 and 1500 and nozzle or burner to plate spacings of 2d, 4d and 6d are experimentally investigated for heat transfer characterisation. Thin metal foil technique is used for characterising isothermal air jets. For a fixed jet Reynolds number, the Nusselt number of isothermal air jet is found independent of the temperature difference between jet and surrounding fluid. A steady state technique is proposed for characterisation of premixed flame jets. The outcome of the present study reveals that the heat transfer characteristics of isothermal air jet and the premixed flame jet are almost same. The higher thermal entrainment in premixed flame jet in comparison with isothermal air jet results in a lower effectiveness. The present heat transfer data can be directly utilised for many practical applications. © 2015 Elsevier Masson SAS.

Department of Mechanical Engineering

World University root node

International Journal of Thermal Sciences

Isothermal air jet and premixed flame jet impingement: Heat transfer characterisation and comparison

In this paper, we propose a new methodology for numerically solving elliptic and parabolic equations with discontinuous coefficients and singular source terms. This new scheme is obtained by clubbing a recently developed higher-order compact methodology with special interface treatment for the points just next to the points of discontinuity. The overall order of accuracy of the scheme is at least second. We first formulate the scheme for one-dimensional (1D) problems and then extend it directly to two-dimensional (2D) problems in polar coordinates. In the process, we also perform convergence and related analysis for both the cases. Finally, we show a new direction of implementing the methodology to 2D problems in cartesian coordinates. We then conduct numerous numerical studies on a number of problems, both for 1D and 2D cases, including the flow past circular cylinder governed by the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations. We compare our results with existing numerical and experimental results. In all the cases, our formulation is found to produce better results on coarser grids. For the circular cylinder problem, the scheme used is seen to capture all the flow characteristics including the famous von K{\'{a}}rm{\'{a}}n vortex street. Copyright {\textcopyright} 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Department of Mathematics

International Journal for Numerical Methods in Fluids

A class of finite difference schemes for interface problems with an HOC approach

Department of Civil Engineering

VII Brazilian Symposium on Rock Mechanics – SBMR

Geomechanical properties of volcanic rocks from Deccan Traps,India.

Faults such as misalignment, rotor cracks and rotor to stator rub can exist collectively in rotor bearing systems. It is an important task for rotor dynamic personnel to monitor and detect faults in rotating machinery. In this paper, the rotor startup vibrations are utilized to solve the fault identification problem using time frequency techniques. Numerical simulations are performed through finite element analysis of the rotor bearing system with individual and collective combinations of faults as mentioned above. Three signal processing tools namely Short Time Fourier Transform (STFT), Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT) and Hilbert Huang Transform (HHT) are compared to evaluate their detection performance. The effect of addition of Signal to Noise ratio (SNR) on three time frequency techniques is presented. The comparative study is focused towards detecting the least possible level of the fault induced and the computational time consumed. The computation time consumed by HHT is very less when compared to CWT based diagnosis. However, for noisy data CWT is more preferred over HHT. To identify fault characteristics using wavelets a procedure to adjust resolution of the mother wavelet is presented in detail. Experiments are conducted to obtain the run-up data of a rotor bearing setup for diagnosis of shaft misalignment and rotor stator rubbing faults. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing

Fault detection in rotor bearing systems using time frequency techniques

Efficient resource planning in energy harvesting wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is of immense practical significance. However, it is encumbered by the sheer diversity of parameters that affect the performance of such WSNs. In this paper, we propose a unified framework that can be leveraged to efficiently design and deploy such large-scale networks. To this end, we propose an intuitive utility function to quantify the Quality of Monitoring (QoM). Based on this QoM, we formulate a long-term time-averaged joint resource allocation problem, whose optimal solution serves as a metric to compare different deployment scenarios. This resource allocation problem is subject to energy and capacity constraints inherent to WSNs. The capacity constraints, though very intuitive, require us to enumerate all the maximal independent sets in the network - a well known NP-hard problem. Therefore, for computational tractability, we replace the maximal independent set constraints with clique constraints. We also prove the sufficiency of the clique constraints, and present an algorithm that obtains an ϵ-optimal solution to the original problem. Finally, we present numerical evaluations to validate the correctness of the proposed algorithm. © 1983-2012 IEEE.

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications

A framework for designing multihop energy harvesting sensor networks

Laser-light diffusers are used in conjunction with pulsed lasers to generate bright, spatially uniform background illumination for imaging and particle sizing applications. The present paper describes a cost effective way of fabricating a fluorescent laser-light diffuser. The procedure to obtain a uniform background using laser illumination is explained. To characterize the diffuser, images are acquired using a CCD camera with the illumination provided using the diffuser and the variations of pixel intensity values along the centerline of the images are plotted. It is observed that the standard deviation of pixel intensity values is fairly small. Hence, these diffusers are suitable for experiments that need a uniform background. © 2016 IOP Publishing Ltd.

Measurement Science and Technology

A fluorescent laser-diffuser arrangement for uniform backlighting

A highly selective and sensitive impedimetric sensor based on molecular imprinted polymer (MIP) has been developed for the detection of 5-chloro-2,4-dinitrotoluene (5CDNT). Computational simulations were carried out for the best combinations of MIP precursors by using Hyperchem software. MIP of 5CDNT is synthesized using the optimized combinations of polymer precursors such as the functional monomer and cross-linker. Synthesized MIP and non-imprinted polymer (NIP) were characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) and BET adsorption isotherm analysis. The surface area and pore volume of MIP are quite high compared to that of NIP, while the average pore diameter of MIP is lower than that of NIP. However, the synthesized MIP with high surface area and quite good pore diameter for free flow of analytes is suitable for efficient binding with the analyte 5CDNT. Binding assay studies of MIP by using UV-Visible spectroscopy showed that the molecular imprinting factor is nearly thrice to that of NIP. Carbon paste electrodes incorporated with MIP were employed as a sensor for 5CDNT by applying electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) as transduction principle. The charge transfer resistance obtained by impedimetric analysis is proportional to the concentration of 5CDNT over a wide concentration range: 10 nM to 100 μM. A linear determination range of 1.0 to 100 μM was obtained, and the low-detection-limit was found to be 0.1 μM. The MIP carbon paste electrode has shown very good selectivity towards specific recognition of 5CDNT despite the coexistence of possible interferents like 2,4-dinitrotoluene and 1,3-dinitrobenzene. The present MIP based sensor system could be used successfully for direct determination of 5CDNT. [Figure not available: see fulltext.] © 2016, Indian Academy of Sciences.

Department of Chemistry

Fulltext

Journal of Chemical Sciences

Development of highly selective electrochemical impedance sensor for detection of sub-micromolar concentrations of 5-Chloro-2,4-dinitrotoluene

Underwater vehicles are usually designed with additional degrees of freedom than those required to accomplish given manipulator tasks. A robot platform should be effective to maintain its position and orientation in order to attain diverse underwater tasks. This study addresses the dynamic modeling of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) which consists of tilting thrusters for hovering motion to oppose reaction force of the manipulator and ocean current. The suggested system consists of four tilting thrusters with six degrees-of-freedom (DOF). The tilting movements of the thrusters make the system unstable due to complex coupling. A robust position tracking controller is designed based on redundancy resolution scheme has been posited. The trajectory tracking potentiality of the manipulator has been analyzed. The numerical results of the proposed redundancy resolution scheme indicate that this approach shows a significantly revamped outcome when compared with the conventional counterpart. © 2016 IEEE.

OCEANS 2016 - Shanghai

Task space position tracking control of an autonomous underwater vehicle with four tilting thrusters

Synthetic macrocycles derived from sequence-defined oligomers are a unique structural class whose ring size, sequence and structure can be tuned via precise organization of the primary sequence. Similar to peptides and other peptidomimetics, these well-defined synthetic macromolecules become pharmacologically relevant when bioactive side chains are incorporated into their primary sequence. In this article, we report the synthesis of oligothioetheramide (oligoTEA) macrocycles via a one-pot acid-catalysed cascade reaction. The versatility of the cyclization chemistry and modularity of the assembly process was demonstrated via the synthesis of >20 diverse oligoTEA macrocycles. Structural characterization via NMR spectroscopy revealed the presence of conformational isomers, which enabled the determination of local chain dynamics within the macromolecular structure. Finally, we demonstrate the biological activity of oligoTEA macrocycles designed to mimic facially amphiphilic antimicrobial peptides. The preliminary results indicate that macrocyclic oligoTEAs with just two-to-three cationic charge centres can elicit potent antibacterial activity against Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria. © 2016 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.

Nature Chemistry

Sequence-defined bioactive macrocycles via an acid-catalysed cascade reaction

Understanding the impact of tensile forces on disulfide bond cleavage is not only crucial to the breaking of cross-linkers in vulcanized materials such as strained rubber, but also to the regulation of protein activity by disulfide switches. By using ab initio simulations in the condensed phase, we investigated the response of disulfide cleavage by β-elimination to mechanical stress. We reveal that the rate-determining first step of the thermal reaction, which is the abstraction of the β-proton, is insensitive to external forces. However, forces larger than about 1 nN were found to reshape the free-energy landscape of the reaction so dramatically that a second channel is created, where the order of the reaction steps is reversed, turning β-deprotonation into a barrier-free follow-up process to C-S cleavage. This transforms a slow and force-independent process with second-order kinetics into a unimolecular reaction that is greatly accelerated by mechanical forces. © 2016 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.