(SoE) School of Engineering

Shiv Nadar University is a comprehensive, multidisciplinary, research-focused, and student-centric University offering a full range of academic programs at the undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral level. With state-of-the-art infrastructure, the University comprises of academic wings, sophisticated labs, international standard sports facilities, amphitheaters, auditorium, conference rooms and smart classrooms. The University&rsquo;s goal is to become internationally recognized for the quality of its research and creative endeavors and their applicability to improving quality of life, generating new insights and expanding the boundaries of human knowledge creativity. Committed to excellence in teaching, research and service, the University aims to serve the higher education needs of India and the world beyond.

Shiv Nadar University

In the present work, we investigated the effectiveness of microwave processing and thermal spraying for developing tungsten carbide (WC)-based erosion-resistant claddings. The microwave cladding showed a columnar structure with a well-bonded interface compared to discrete splat morphology and discontinuous interface of the thermal spray coating. The cladding showed a lower hardness (800 HV) compared to thermal spray coating (1,300 HV) and a two times higher fracture toughness due to the absence of splat boundaries and pores. The microwave cladding also showed 14 times and 10 times higher cavitation erosion resistance than thermal spray coating and SS316L substrate steel, respectively. The improved cavitation erosion resistance of the microwave cladding is explained on the basis of the optimized combination of hardness and fracture toughness. The surface of eroded cladding showed plastically deformed micropits compared to the thermal spray coatings, which showed large craters. Results show that microwave claddings can help improve the durability of engineering systems. © 2021 Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers.

World University root node

Mechanical Engineering

Tribology Transactions

Development of Cavitation Erosion–Resistant Microwave Processed WC-based Cladding

Biofiber-based polymer composites have seen tremendous growth in the last decade and are expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 11.8% from 2016 to 2024. Biofiber composites are 25%-30% stronger than glass fiber of the same weight, which make them a potential player in the manufacturing industry. In this chapter, we present the advances and application of biofiber-based polymer composite in aerospace, automotive, military and defense, construction, and electronics followed by a recycling comparison study between synthetic, hybrid, and complete biofiber polymer composites. In the later part of the chapter, the advances in multiscale analysis, manufacturing methods, and pretreatment in biofiber and polymer composites are presented. At the end of the chapter, the future prospects of biofiber-based polymer composites are discussed. © 2022 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved.

Advances in Bio-Based Fiber: Moving Towards a Green Society

Advances and applications of biofiber-based polymer composites

This work is an extension part of the Assembly Line Worker Assignment Balancing Problem(ALWABP), aims to provide a dynamic solution for an assembly line fatigue worker job rotation by using machine learning based digital twin. This framework explains, fatigue worker identification and work rotation possibilities for a reconfigurable assembly line. The fatigue causing parameters are sensed from the workers and classified with a fatigue classifier then send the fatigue worker details to a worker job rotation search algorithm. The job rotation search algorithm provides a suggestion to the production supervisor for a best possible worker job rotation/reallocation solution dynamically. © 2021 The Author(s).

Procedia CIRP

A dynamic job rotation scheduling conceptual framework by a human representing digital twin

In this manuscript, a graphene material based quad-band antenna for the frequency range of 60-120GHz is proposed. The proposed antenna has a very small radiating patch area (2100×1450µm2) and shows a good impedance matching at all the resonating frequencies. The radiating patch is placed on the Polyimide substrate with a thickness of 114µm. The proposed antenna radiates at 60GHz, 72.5GHz, 100GHz, and 117GHz with the gain of 6.22dBi, 5.63dBi, 5.94dBi, and 3.84dBi, respectively. This antenna can be used for indoor and short-range communication systems for 60-120GHz.

Electrical Engineering

Quad-Band Graphene Antenna for 60--120 GHz Indoor Communication System

This letter presents a small-scale wireless distributed cooperative secure-communication network (WDCSN) design using a novel spectral graph FIR filter to achieve desired secrecy capacity at the intended receiver in the presence of single and multiple eavesdroppers. An undirected weighted graph \mathcal {G} (V, \mathcal {E}, W), with relays, eavesdroppers, source, and destination are as nodes (V), and circularly symmetric complex Gaussian random variables as edge weights (W) are considered to represent the WDCSN. A graph Laplacian is used as a graph shift operator to design the proposed filter. Filter coefficients are calculated by using the least squared error as a criterion. Simulations are conducted for a two-way WDCSN to achieve the desired secrecy capacity using different graph structures considered for WDCSN. The proposed filter design's performance is quantified by using the secrecy outage probability metric. The results show that desired secrecy capacity with SOP of 10^{-2} is achievable using the proposed methodology, irrespective of graph structures with variable complexity. An SOP performance gain of (60\!-\!80) \% is achieved over the SOP reported in the literature. © 2017 IEEE.

IEEE Sensors Letters

A Small-Scale Wireless Distributed Cooperative Secure Communication Network Design Using Graph FIR Filters

Haze is an aggregation of very fine, widely dispersed, solid and/or liquid particles suspended in the atmosphere. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end network for single image dehazing, which enhances the CycleGAN model by introducing a transformer architecture within the generator, which is specific for haze removal. The proposed model is trained in an unpaired fashion with clear and hazy images altogether and does not require pairs of hazy and corresponding ground-truth clear images. Furthermore, the proposed model does not depend on estimating the parameters of the atmospheric scattering model. Rather, it uses a K-estimation module as the generator's transformer for complete end-to-end modeling. The feature transformer introduced in the proposed generator model transforms the encoded features into desired feature space and then feeds them into the CycleGAN decoder to create a clear image. In the proposed model we further modified the cycle consistency loss to include the SSIM loss along with pixel-wise mean loss to produce a new loss function specific for the reconstruction task, which enhances the performance of the proposed model. The model performs well even on the high-resolution images provided in the NTIRE 2019 challenge dataset for single image dehazing. Further, we perform experiments on NYU-Depth and reside beta datasets. Results of our experiments show the efficacy of the proposed approach compared to the state-of-the-art in removing the haze from the input image. © 2021 Elsevier Inc.

Computer Science and Engineering

Fulltext

Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation

Single image dehazing using improved cycleGAN

This work presents the designing of 3D uniform circular array using eight exponential flare slot Vivaldi antenna elements that resonates in the frequency range of 3.68 to 5 GHz for generation of Orbital Angular Momentum (OAM) radio waves. Eight exponential flare slot Vivaldi antenna elements are placed in circular manner that form cylindrical arrangement. These elements are connected to a single coaxial cable at its center through a power divider network. All elements of circular array are fed with uniform amplitude and phase, to make progressive phase difference 0° for OAM mode 0. Similarly progressive phase difference -45° for OAM mode -1, and progressive phase difference 45° for OAM mode -1 has been simulated and results are presented. A prototype for the OAM (mode 0) in the above frequency range is fabricated and measured. The hardware results obtained through testing of the array provide are closer to the simulated results. For OAM mode 0, four-element antenna array is also simulated to check the mode purity and results are discussed with 8-element antenna array. The beam divergence of proposed high capacity OAM antenna can be utilized in EVs and HEVs. © 2021 IEEE.

2021 International Conference on Sustainable Energy and Future Electric Transportation, SeFet 2021

Exponential Flare Slot Vivaldi OAM Antenna for near Field Communication in EVs and HEVs

L-asparaginase is a cardinal biotherapeutic drug for treating acute lymphoblastic leukemia, which is highly prevalent in children worldwide. In the current investigation, L-asparaginase producing marine bacterial isolate, Bacillus australimaris NJB19 (MG734654), was observed to be producing extracellular glutaminase free L-asparaginase (13.27 ± 0.4 IU mL−1). Production of L-asparaginase was enhanced by the Box-Behnken design approach that enumerated the significant variables affecting the enzyme production. The optimum levels of the derived variables resulted in 2.8-fold higher levels of the enzyme production (37.93 ± 1.06 IU mL−1). An 1146 bp L-asparaginase biosynthetic gene of Bacillus australimaris NJB19 was identified and cloned in E. coli DH5α, fused with a histidine tag. The in silico analysis of the protein sequence revealed the presence of a signal peptide and classified it as a type II L-asparaginase. Toxic peptide prediction disclosed no toxin domain in the protein sequence, hence suggesting it as a non-toxic protein. The secondary structure analysis of the enzyme displayed a comparable percentage of alpha-helical and random coil structure, while 14.39\% and 6.57\% of amino acid residues were composed of extended strands and beta-turns, respectively. The functional sites in the three-dimensional structural model of the protein were predicted and interestingly had a few less conserved residues. Bacillus australimaris NJB19 identified in this study produces type-II L-asparaginase, known for its high affinity for asparagine and effectiveness against leukemic cells. Hence, these observations indicate the L-asparaginase, thus obtained, as a potentially significant and novel therapeutic drug. © 2021 Elsevier B.V.

Chemical Engineering

International Journal of Biological Macromolecules

A potential type-II L-asparaginase from marine isolate Bacillus australimaris NJB19: Statistical optimization, in silico analysis and structural modeling

Atmospheric degradation of the metallic components initiated by the accumulation of contaminants and humidity significantly limits the performance and sustainability of many engineering systems. Aluminium and its alloys are widely used in different industries such as food processing, marine, aerospace, automobiles and household appliances. The leaching of aluminium can cause significant environmental and health-related issues. In the present study, a facile and environment-friendly (hot water treatment) processing route was utilized to fabricate sustainable Al surfaces without the use of any chemical reagents and toxic solvents. The developed nanostructured Al surface showed immense mechanical, chemical and thermal durability restricting corrosion and leaching of aluminium. The processed Al composed of self-assembled 2D nanostructures showed extreme wettability ranging from superhydrophilic (θ &lt; 5°) to superhydrophobicity (SHS) (θ &gt; 160°), depending upon post-processing conditions. The developed SHS has showed high water (droplet impacts) and dust repellence under static and dynamic conditions. This is related with effective entrapment of air, prompted by the presence of nanostructured morphology, leading to stable Cassie state. Results showed that SHS possess better self-cleaning ability compared to the superhydrophilic counterpart. The SHS showed better sustainability in terms of high thermal stability in a temperature range of −80 °C to 350 °C and corrosion resistance under prolonged immersion for 48 h in salt media. Compared to unprocessed counterpart, SHS showed 40 times reduction in the corrosion rate, which is significantly high when compared with several other processing routes. The present study showed an eco-friendly and straightforward approach which can be effectively used for fabricating multifunctional metallic surfaces with widespread applications. © 2020 Elsevier Ltd

Physics

(SoNS) School of Natural Sciences

Journal of Cleaner Production

Green manufacturing of nanostructured Al-Based sustainable self-cleaning metallic surfaces

The effectiveness of CO2 absorption in ionic liquids (ILs) depends on the physical properties of cations/anions of the IL and their influence on ion-ion and ion-CO2 interactions. A molecular understanding of these cation-anion and ion-CO2 interactions is vital to identify promising ILs for CO2 capture. Koopmans' theorem based on quantum mechanics was used to compute several interaction descriptors, such as ionization potential (IP), electron affinity (EA), chemical potential, chemical hardness, softness, and electrophilicity index for cations/anions/ILs. Density Functional Theory (DFT) studies were performed to obtain interaction energies (IE) for ion-ion and ion-CO2 interactions. Several cations (imidazolium-based and pyridinium-based), inorganic (F¯, BF4¯, etc.) and organic anions ([TF2N]¯, [bFAP]¯, etc.) and cation-anion combinations were considered in the present study. The analysis of different interaction descriptors provided a better understanding of the relationships between the EA of cation, the IP of anion, and cation-anion IE values with the experimental CO2 solubility. Several inferences can be made based on the results obtained: a) the cation-anion interaction energy and IP of the anion have a strong correlation with the CO2 solubility, b) the IE trends of ion-CO2 and CO2-IL alone do not correlate well with the experimental CO2 solubility trends, (c) free molecular volume or interstitial spaces resulting from entropic effects of cation-anion interactions due to the nature/structure of cation and anion, play a dominant role for an effective CO2 absorption, (d) for a particular anion, changing the cation does not significantly influence cation-anion IE and ion-CO2 IE values, while for a particular cation, the nature of anion dramatically influences cation-anion IE and ion-CO2 IE values – consistent with the experimental CO2 solubility trends. Of the anions and cations studied, the combination of anions containing fluoroalkyl groups, such as [TF2N]¯ and [bFAP]¯, with the cations, such as [hmim]+ and [hmpy]+ constitute promising solvents for efficient CO2 capture. The findings of this study emphasize the importance of assessing cation-anion and ion-CO2 interactions in conjunction with other interaction descriptors to design efficient solvents for CO2 capture. © 2020