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

Humanity experienced one of the worst crises in recent history due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The spread of the disease and the lockdown announced by the government of India created an emergency, disrupting the supply of essential commodities and creating panic and anxiety among the people. This paper aims at capturing the behavior of consumers purchasing essential commodities before and during the lockdown using an online questionnaire. Responses from 730 households covering 20 states in India were used. The data analysis revealed that consumers made a lesser number of trips during lockdown but purchased excess commodities considering the future uncertainties. The local family grocery stores, called kirana shops served well during the pandemic. During the lockdown, consumers made shorter trips by vehicles and walked extensively. Income was found to influence purchase behavior. The disruptions at the organized retail stores for in-store as well as online purchases were identified using factor analysis. Out of the three factors identified each for in-store and online purchases, perceived risk and vendor distrust had major influence respectively. The findings of this study give pointers to many infrastructure and policy initiatives that target tackling such emergencies in the future. © 2021 Elsevier Ltd

World University root node

Department of Civil Engineering

Research in Transportation Business and Management

Consumer responses towards essential purchases during COVID-19 pan-India lockdown

Journal of the Geological Society of India

Stability Analysis of Failed Slope in Tindharia Region, West Bengal, India—A Case Study

Structures

Deformation behavior of D-Shaped shallow tunnels under dynamic loading conditions

Experimental and numerical investigation of the dynamic response of tunnel in soft rocks

The Minkowski function is a crucial tool used in the study of balanced domains and, more generally, quasi-balanced domains in several complex variables. If a quasi-balanced domain is bounded and pseudoconvex then it is well-known that its Minkowski function is plurisubharmonic. In this short note, we prove that under the additional assumption of smoothness of the boundary, the Minkowski function of a quasi-balanced domain is in fact smooth away from the origin. This allows us to construct a smooth plurisubharmonic defining function for such domains. Our result is new even in the case of balanced domains. © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Department of Mathematics

Fulltext

Complex Variables and Elliptic Equations

A note on the smoothness of the Minkowski function

arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.

Limits of an increasing sequence of complex manifolds

Large tracts of soft clay deposits are present in many world nations especially along their shore lines and estuaries. These deposits are characterised by their high compressibility with low shear strength making them unsuitable to serve as foundation bed. However, in view of enormous economic activity along the coasts, large-scale infrastructure development becomes inevitable. In view of this, the soft clay deposits are to be improved by suitable methods of stabilization. In this direction, stone columns, preloading with or without vertical drains, deep lime or cement mixing and electro-osmosis have been popularly used across the world. In the recent years, efforts are being made to use geopolymer technology as an alternative to lime/cement mixing as an attempt to reduce the carbon footprint. Besides carbon footprint reduction, several researchers (Duxson et al. in J Mater Sci 42(9):2917–2933, (2007) [1]; Majidi in Mater Technol 24(2):79–87, (2009) [2]; Neupane et al. in Mech Mater 103:110–122 (2016) [3]) reported the technical advantages of high early strength, extraordinary durability, resistance to chemical attack and ability to immobilize toxic atoms for geopolymer compared to conventional lime/cement. Keeping in view these recent trends in geopolymer technology, an attempt is made to study the influence of ground granulated blast furnace slag (GGBS) binder with different molarity of activator, the sodium hydroxide (NaOH). The soft clay is simulated by preparing the clay paste at 0.75, 1.0 and 1.25 times the liquid limit water content. At these initial clay consistencies, the influence of GGBS and NaOH is studied. From this study, it is revealed that the unconfined compressive strength of stabilised clay increases with increase in activator to binder (A/B) ratio and curing period for any binder content. Increased molarity of activator has little influence on the strength gain. The strength gain is observed to be higher at higher initial consistency of clay. © 2021, Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering

Geopolymer Stabilization of Soft Clays—An Emerging Technique

An orientation of an undirected graph G is an assignment of exactly one direction to each edge of G. The oriented diameter of a graph G is the smallest diameter among all the orientations of G. The maximum oriented diameter of a family of graphs ℱ is the maximum oriented diameter among all the graphs in ℱ. Chvátal and Thomassen [JCTB, 1978] gave a lower bound of [Figure presented] and an upper bound of 2d2+2d for the maximum oriented diameter of the family of 2-edge connected graphs of diameter d. We improve this upper bound to 1.373d2+6.971d−1, which outperforms the former upper bound for all values of d greater than or equal to 8. For the family of 2-edge connected graphs of diameter 3, Kwok, Liu and West [JCTB, 2010] obtained improved lower and upper bounds of 9 and 11 respectively. For the family of 2-edge connected graphs of diameter 4, the bounds provided by Chvátal and Thomassen are 12 and 40 and no better bounds were known. By extending the method we used for diameter d graphs, along with an asymmetric extension of a technique used by Chvátal and Thomassen, we have improved this upper bound to 21.1 © 2021 Elsevier B.V.

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Discrete Applied Mathematics

An improvement to Chvátal and Thomassen's upper bound for oriented diameter

The current work presents a formulation of stochastic B-spline wavelet on the interval (BSWI)-based wavelet finite element method (WFEM) for analysis of beams incorporating von Kármán nonlinear strains. The spatial variation of the modulus of elasticity is modelled as a homogeneous random field. The proposed formulation is given for both Euler–Bernoulli beam theory and Timoshenko beam theory. For the discretization of both random field and response, BSWI scaling functions are used. A set of three nonlinear equations is derived based on the perturbation approach for evaluating the derivatives of the field variable with respect to random variables. Numerical examples under different boundary conditions based on the proposed formulations are solved and compared with solutions obtained from Monte Carlo simulation (MCS). The effect of the coefficient of variation and correlation length parameter on the response statistics is examined. In addition, a comparison of normalized computational times obtained from the perturbation approach and MCS is carried out. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria, part of Springer Nature.

Acta Mechanica

A perturbation-based stochastic nonlinear beam element formulation using the B-spline wavelet on the interval finite element method

A modern control approach for a submerged robot with tiltable thrusters is explored in this paper. The rotatable action capability of the four thrusters makes the system framework as over-actuated with only six degrees of freedom (DOF) to be carried out. The dynamic model of the submerged robot on account of rotatable angles results in highly nonlinear thrust vector mapping, where linearization of the model leads to the rejection of possibly advantageous nonlinearities. This issue can be abstained by utilizing model-based nonlinear control schemes such as backstepping in the presence of continuous rotatable action resulting in a better control action. The stability of the system is ensured by the Lyapunov stability criterion by tuning the control gain constants with the RMS values of tracking error. Finally, the numerical simulations demonstrate the cascaded nature of the derived tracking control, where the tracking errors asymptotically reduce to close vicinity of zero. © 2021, The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.