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

A systematic, analytical method to obtain the charge density and surface potential in an N-polar GaN/AlGaN heterostructure is presented. This method also provides the wave functions, sub-band energies, and band diagram. The model accounts for the greater leakage of the wave functions into the spacer and barrier layers in the N-polar structure as compared to the Ga-polar structure. The framework is based on the solution of Schrodinger-Poisson equations for an approximately triangular well potential with finite confinement, achieved using first-order perturbation theory. No fitting parameters are used. Results obtained using our model are in good agreement with numerical results (obtained using the finite difference method) for a wide range of bias conditions.

Department of Electrical Engineering

World University root node

TechRxiv

Airy function based model for 2-DEG charge and surface potential in N-polar Gallium Nitride heterostructures

Rainfall induced slope failures are becoming a major threat in unsaturated soil slopes worldwide. Major part of Kerala state in India, especially the hilly regions are covered with residual lateritic soil that are formed under the process of weathering and mineralogical changes in the parent rock. Matric suction within the natural soil slopes contribute to its stability in the unsaturated state as it increases the shear strength. Many rainfall induced slope failures were reported in lateritic soil slopes in Kerala, during monsoon seasons of 2018, 2019, and 2020. An attempt was made to check the feasibility of application of geosynthetic reinforced composites in repairing and reconstructing a failed soil slope by means of resilient reinforced soil structures. The reinforced composites used in the present study was a knitted polypropylene non-woven geotextile, reinforced with high-tenacity polyester yarns in both machine and cross machine directions. The geotechnical characterization of the soil collected from the failed slope was carried out. Soil water characteristic curve of the lateritic soil and geosynthetic water characteristic curve of the hybrid geosynthetics were experimentally determined. Rainfall infiltration analysis was conducted in order to check the resilience or adaptation of the geosynthetics reinforced soil slopes to a changing climate. The stability analysis confirmed that the unreinforced soil slopes fail at the onset of rainfall infiltration whereas reinforced slope with reinforced composites helped in maintaining the integrity of slopes.

Department of Civil Engineering

ASCE Geotechnical Special Publication GSP 331,

Reinforced Composites for Resilient Reinforced Soil Slopes to Prevent Rainfall Induced Failures

GW170817 has confirmed binary neutron star mergers as one of the sites for rapid neutron capture (r) process. However, there are large theoretical and experimental uncertainties associated with the resulting nucleosynthesis calculations and additional sites may be needed to explain all the existing observations. In this regard, abundances of short-lived radioactive isotopes (SLRIs) in the early Solar system (ESS), which are synthesized exclusively by r-process, can provide independent clues regarding the nature of r-process events. In this work, we study the evolution of r-process SLRIs 129I and 247Cm as well as the corresponding reference isotopes 127I and 235U at the solar location. We consider up to three different sources that have distinct 129I/247Cm production ratios corresponding to the varied r-process conditions in different astrophysical scenarios. In contrast to results reported in a recent study, we find that 129I and 247Cm in the ESS do not come entirely from a single major event but get contributions from at least two more minor contributors. This has a dramatic effect on the evolution of the 129I/247Cm ratio, such that the measured ESS value in meteorites may not correspond to that of the ‘last’ major r-process event. Interestingly, however, we find that the 129I/247Cm ratio, in combination with the observed 129I/127I and 247Cm/235U ratio in the ESS, can still provide important constraints on the properties of proposed r-process sources operating in the Milky Way.

Department of Physics

Fulltext

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

Constraints on r-process nucleosynthesis from 129I and 247Cm in the early Solar system

We explore a small quantum refrigerator in which the working substance is made of paradigmatic nearest-neighbor quantum spin models, the XYZ and the XY model with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions, consisting of two and three spins, each of which is in contact with a bosonic bath. We identify a specific range of interaction strengths which can be tuned appropriately to ensure a cooling of the selected spin in terms of its local temperature in the weak-coupling limit. Moreover, we report that in this domain, when one of the interaction strengths is disordered, the performance of the thermal machine operating as a refrigerator remains almost unchanged instead of degrading, thereby establishing the flexibility of this device. However, to obtain a significant amount of cooling via ordered as well as disordered spin models, we observe that one has to go beyond the weak-coupling limit and compute the figures of merit by using global master equations.

PHYSICAL REVIEW A

Designing Robust Quantum Refrigerators in Disordered Spin Models

B0 -VPG graphs are intersection graphs of axis-parallel line segments in the plane. We show that all AT-free outerplanar graphs are B0 -VPG. In the course of the argument, we show that any AT-free outerplanar graph can be identified as an induced subgraph of a 2-connected outerplanar graph whose weak dual is a path. Our B0 -VPG drawing procedure works for such graphs and has the potential to be extended to larger classes of outerplanar graphs. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)

B0 -VPG Representation of AT-free Outerplanar Graphs

Environmental Sciences and Sustainable Engineering Centre (ESSENCE)

in silico Plants

BioCro II: a Software Package for Modular Crop Growth Simulations

Caste in India, despite its historical resilience, has been undergoing transformation since independence. If caste as a system of rigid stratification has been on the decline, castes as autonomous interest-serving groups have been on ascendance. This book critically engages with the changing notions of caste and its intersection with public policy in India. It discusses key issues such as social security, internal reservation, the idea of Most Backward Classes, caste issues among non-Hindu religious communities, caste in census, caste in market, and service castes and urban planning. Drawing on in-depth case studies from states including Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Karnataka, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, and West Bengal, the volume explores the cyclical process of how caste drives policies, and how policies in turn shape the reality of caste in India. It looks at the impact of factors like protective discrimination, adult franchise and democratic decentralisation, horizontal and vertical mobilisation, land reforms, and religious conversion on social mobility, and traditional hierarchy in India. Empirically rich and analytically rigorous, this book will be an excellent reference for scholars and researchers of public policy, public administration, sociology, exclusion studies, social work, law, history, economics, political science, development studies, social anthropology, and political sociology. It will also be of interest to public policy and development practitioners. © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Institute of Public Policy; individual chapters, the contributors.

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences

Caste Matters in Public Policy: Issues and Perspectives

CASTE MATTERS IN PUBLIC POLICY: Issues and Perspectives

Based on an ethnographic fieldwork in rural Andhra Pradesh, this chapter argues that the social hierarchy is changing and the constitutionally assured protective discrimination policy is a major contributor to this change. Though underutilised on the education and employment front, this policy, especially the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, has made for a substantial political tool. The policy measures coupled with the lower jatis moving up the economic hierarchy, thanks to the migration to the Middle-East, and the higher jatis slipping down the hierarchy makes for a dynamic socio-economic milieu. The chapter further analyses the significance of such benefits in a neo-liberal economy to the lower jatis, on one hand, and its contribution to the political maximisation of primordial identities, on the other. © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Institute of Public Policy; individual chapters, the contributors.

Economic prospects, protective discrimination, and the changing hierarchy: An ethnographic study in a coastal village in Andhra Pradesh

Preface

The erythrocyte sedimentation rate is one of the oldest medical diagnostic methods whose physical mechanisms remain debatable today. Using both light microscopy and mesoscale cell-level simulations, we show that erythrocytes form a soft-particle gel. Furthermore, the high volume fraction of erythrocytes, their deformability, and weak attraction lead to unusual properties of this gel. A theoretical model for the gravitational collapse is developed, whose predictions are in agreement with detailed macroscopic measurements of the interface velocity. © 2022 American Physical Society.