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

This work focuses on determining the link interference-free workspace of a Cartesian (3-PRRR) parallel manipulator. An algorithm for obtaining the largest volume cuboid that inscribes the interference-free workspace is proposed, which can be used as a performance index for the mechanism under investigation. The effect of link dimensions and the size of the moving platform on the interference-free workspace is also analysed in this work. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

World University root node

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Mechanisms and Machine Science

Investigation of Interference-Free Workspace of a Cartesian (3-PRRR) Parallel Manipulator

Spin waves are studied for data storage, communication, and logic circuits in the field of spintronics based on their potential to substitute electrons. The recent discovery of magnetism in 2D systems such as monolayer CrI3 and Cr2Ge2Te6 has led to a renewed interest in such applications of magnetism in the 2D limit. Here, direct evidence of standing spin waves is presented along with the uniform precessional resonance modes in the van der Waals magnetic material, CrCl3. This is the first direct observation of standing spin-wave modes, set up along a thickness of 20 mm, in a van der Waals material. Standing spin waves are detected in the vicinity of both branches, optical and acoustic, of the antiferromagnetic resonance. Magnon–magnon coupling and softening of resonance modes with temperature enable extraction of interlayer exchange field as a function of temperature. © 2020 Wiley-VCH GmbH

Department of Physics

Advanced Materials

Observation of Standing Spin Waves in a van der Waals Magnetic Material

Department of Civil Engineering

Eighth Indian Young Geotechnical Engineers Conference 2021

Performance of compacted lateritic soil embankments during extreme rainfall

We show that quantum absorption refrigerators, which have traditionally been studied as of three qubits, each of which is connected to a thermal reservoir, can also be constructed by using three qubits and two thermal baths, where two of the qubits, including the qubit to be locally cooled, are connected to a common bath. With a careful choice of the system, bath, and qubit-bath interaction parameters within the Born-Markov and rotating-wave approximations, one of the qubits attached to the common bath achieves a cooling in the steady state. We observe that the proposed refrigerator may also operate in a parameter regime where no or negligible steady-state cooling is achieved, but there is considerable transient cooling. The steady-state temperature can be lowered significantly by an increase in the strength of the few-body interaction terms existing due to the use of the common bath in the refrigerator setup. The proposed refrigerator built with three qubits and two baths is shown to provide steady-state cooling for both Markovian qubit-bath interactions between the qubits and canonical bosonic thermal reservoirs, and a simpler reset model for the qubit-bath interactions. © 2021 American Physical Society.

Fulltext

Physical Review A

Three qubits in less than three baths: Beyond two-body system-bath interactions in quantum refrigerators

The interface of freshwater and saltwater plays an important role in the economic and social dynamics along the coast and estuaries. Droughts in coastal areas have ecological impacts and affect socioeconomic dynamics and public health. In this study, we developed a bivariate and multivariate drought index that can quantify and indicate drought conditions in coastal, bay, and estuarine areas by integrating the meteorological and hydrological drought variables. The bivariate coastal drought index (BCDI) was developed using copula theory, which includes streamflow and salinity levels in the bay areas. Further, the entropy-weighted Euclidean distance method was used to develop the multivariate coastal drought (MCDI) index using precipitation, salinity, and streamflow datasets. Both the BCDI and MCDI were able to capture the major drought events occurring in the southeast region (2000, 2007, and 2011-2012) of the United States. Correlation analysis showed that both the BCDI and MCDI were highly correlated with the standardized univariate drought indices. One of the better features of the MCDI was that it was able to capture the dynamics and trends of the variables involved and, thus, was a better indicator of droughts in the coastal regions. Hit rates and false alarm ratios showed that both the indices were able to capture the droughts in coastal regions. The coastal drought indices developed in the study can be used by the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) and other agencies as drought indicators for coastal regions, along the coastal regions, estuaries, and bays in the United States. © 2020 American Society of Civil Engineers.

Journal of Hydrologic Engineering

Comprehensive Drought Assessment Tool for Coastal Areas, Bays, and Estuaries: Development of a Coastal Drought Index

Rapid tool degradation poses a critical challenge for joining of high carbon steels using friction stir welding (FSW) despite its ability to provide sound and defect-free welded joints. Tools of tungsten carbide with nickel binder phase (WC-Ni) are potential alternatives as they exhibit good strength and toughness. A detailed examination on the wear and consequent damage of WC-Ni tools for FSW of steels is reported in this work. The results show that the longevity of the WC-Ni tools is improved at relatively higher welding speed and lower tool rotational speed during FSW of high carbon steels. In contrast, higher tool rotational speeds and lower welding speeds result in higher rate of heat generation and elevated temperature leading to adhesion wear and oxidation of the tools. In FSW of typical 3-mm-thick high carbon steel plates, a tool rotational speed of 300 rpm and welding speed of 150 mm min−1 resulted in the minimum tool wear and allowed the use of a single tool up to 1000 mm without any significant damage. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature.

International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology

Degradation of nickel-bonded tungsten carbide tools in friction stir welding of high carbon steel

Tecnologia em Metalurgia, Materiais e Minera{\c{c}}{\~{a}}o

Probing underlying mechanisms for PCBN tool decay during friction stir welding of nickel-based alloys

With the increasing demand for high performance computing in application domains with stringent power budgets, coarse-grained reconfigurable array (CGRA) architectures have become a popular choice among researchers and manufacturers. Loops are the hot-spots of kernels running on CGRAs and hence several techniques have been devised to optimize the loop execution. However, works in this direction are predominantly software-based solutions. This paper addresses the optimization opportunities at a deeper level and introduces a hardware based loop control mechanism that can support arbitrarily nested loops up to four levels. Major contributions of this work are, a lightweight Hardware Loop Block (HLB) for CGRAs that eliminates control instruction overhead of loops and an acyclic graph transformation that removes loop branches from the application CDFG. When tested on a set of kernels chosen from various application domains, the design could achieve a maximum of 1.9 × and an average of 1.5 × speed-up against the conventional approach. The total number of instructions executed is reduced to half for almost all the kernels with an area and power consumption overhead of 2.6% and 0.8% respectively. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Department of Data Science

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

Hardware Based Loop Optimization for CGRA Architectures

Proceedings of the 26thNational and 4th International ISHMT-ASTFE Heat and {\ldots}

Prediction of thermal contact conductance in conforming rough metal contacts through regeneration of surface profile

Hypothesis: Evaporating sessile drops containing surface active colloids is a promising route to self-assemble two-dimensional nanostructures. The standard protocol is to first self-assemble surface active nanoscale particles at the water-vapour interface and subsequently transfer it on to a solid surface. Colloidal monolayers with very few morphologies have been fabricated, exploiting this bottom-up self-assembly technique. However, the evaporation kinetics under controlled humidity conditions may dramatically alter the microstructure of self-assembled colloidal monolayers at the liquid–vapor interface and that on the solid surfaces, an aspect that has not been fully addressed in the prior studies. Experiments: To this end, we present an experimental study of evaporation driven self-assembly of soft poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (pNIPAM) microgel particles loaded in a sessile drop. The surface-active microgel particles spontaneously populate the water-vapour interface facilitating the suppression of the coffee-ring effect and the formation of monolayer stains. The role of evaporation kinetics under controlled humidity conditions on the colloid's microstructure adsorbed to the solvent-air interface and on the morphology of the colloidal monolayer transferred onto the solid surface are studied in detail. Findings: The formation of particle-free and particle-rich regions at the water–vapor interface is observed for sessile drops evaporated under saturated humidity conditions. We show that the evaporation induced shrinkage of the interface area and the enhancement of the areal density of microgel particles adsorbed onto the interface leads to a restructuring of the particle-laden interface. The rearrangement of microgel particles along the water–vapor interface resembling the de-wetting assisted patterns is transferred to the solid substrate upon complete evaporation of the solvent. The microgel particles in the deposit assemble into domains with enhanced crystalline order. The evolution of Voronoi entropy across the monolayer deposit patterns obtained by the standard and slow evaporation routes are presented. © 2020 Elsevier Inc.