(SoE) School of Engineering

<p>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.</p>

Shiv Nadar University

Model predictive control (MPC) is a model-based control philosophy in which the current control action is obtained by on-line optimization of objective function. MPC is, by now, considered to be a mature technology owing to the plethora of research and industrial process control applications. The model under consideration is either linear or piece-wise linear. However, turning to the nonlinear processes, the difficulties are in obtaining a good nonlinear model, and the excessive computational burden associated with the control optimization. Proposed framework, named as model-free predictive control (MFPC), takes care of both the issues of conventional MPC. Model-free reinforcement learning formulates predictive control problem with a control horizon of only length one, but takes a decision based on infinite horizon information. In order to facilitate generalization in continuous state and action spaces, fuzzy inference system is used as a function approximator in conjunction with Q-learning. Empirical study on a continuous stirred tank reactor shows that the MFPC reinforcement learning framework is efficient, and strongly robust. © 2016, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Electrical Engineering

Fulltext

IFAC-PapersOnLine

Model-free predictive control of nonlinear processes based on reinforcement learning

This paper presents a novel design of a rectangular microstrip patch antenna with two rectangular notches for operation at 5 GHz frequency. The proposed antenna has patch of 14 mm length and 28 mm width, it is designed and simulated on FR4 substrate of permittivity 4.1 and thickness 1.5 mm, for operating frequency of 5 GHz. The return loss is 28dB at 5 GHz. The antenna can be used for IEEE802.11a wireless local area network (WLAN) applications. © 2016 IEEE.

Proceedings of the 2016 IEEE International Conference on Wireless Communications, Signal Processing and Networking, WiSPNET 2016

Design of notch antenna for 5 GHz high speed LAN

Megacities in India (population more than 10 million) have taken actions to control air-pollution emissions. However, the second-level cities (population between one and 10 million) have not drawn an action plan, and people face serious air pollution in these cities. For one such city, Lucknow, a geographic information system (GIS)-based methodology for emission inventory of on-road vehicles has been developed. The pollutants include: sulfur dioxide (SO2); oxides of nitrogen (NOx); carbon monoxide (CO); particulate matter (PM); 1,3 butadiene; formaldehyde; acetaldehyde; total aldehydes; and total polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Video recording was done at nine road intersections of varying land-use patterns to assess traffic count and vehicle kilometer travel. Parking lot surveys were carried out for assessing engine type, vehicle age, etc. and to arrive at a suitable net emission factor for each vehicle category. The 2-wheelers (2-Ws) and 4-wheelers (4-Ws) dominate the total traffic with an 83% share and are main sources of NOx (46%) and CO (77%). The heavy duty vehicles (HDVs: buses and trucks), although they account for only 2% of the vehicle fleet, emit disproportionately high emissions (23% of SO2, 36% of NOx, and 28% of PM). Spatial cell (2×2 km)-wise emission inventory of pollutants indicates that the city center has the highest pollutant emissions resulting from a large number of vehicles, mostly 2-Ws, 3-Ws, and passenger cars. The inventory information can be used for short-term and long-term planning to reduce emissions. © 2014 American Society of Civil Engineers.

Civil Engineering

Journal of Hazardous, Toxic, and Radioactive Waste

GIS-based on-road vehicular emission inventory for Lucknow, India

We consider a fast fading AWGN multiple-access channel (MAC) with full receiver CSI and distributed CSI at the transmitters. The objective is to evaluate the ergodic sum-capacity of this decentralized model, under identical average powers and channel statistics across users. While an optimal water-filling solution can be found for centralized MACs with full CSI at all terminals, such an explicit solution is not considered feasible in distributed CSI models. Our main contribution is an upper-bound on the ergodic sum-capacity when each transmitter is aware only of its own fading coefficients. Interestingly, our techniques also suggest an appropriate lower bound. These bounds are shown to be very close to each other, suggesting the tight nature of the results.

IEEE Communications Letters

On the Ergodic Sum-Capacity of Decentralized Multiple Access Channels

As per energy efficiency of a photovoltaic (PV) system is concerned, partial shading is an important issue. Under partial shading condition, the modules of a PV array receive different levels of solar irradiation, so the power generation of a PV system decreases. The power-voltage characteristic of a partially shaded PV array contains multiple local maxima, and the global maximum power point is one of them. The losses in a PV array depend on the shading pattern and the physical location of shaded modules. This paper presents the Futoshiki puzzle pattern for the arrangement of the modules of a PV array under partial shading condition, ensuring the enhancement of the power generation with respect to totally crossed tired (TCT) structure. In this method, the physical locations of modules in a TCT structure PV array are rearranged without changing the electrical connection of the modules. A comparison between the power generation in TCT and Futoshiki puzzle pattern configuration is presented. It is demonstrated that the power generated by a PV array in the Futoshiki configuration method is enhanced, and mismatch loss (ML) is minimized under different shading patterns by theoretical, simulation, and experimental results. © 2013 IEEE.

IEEE Journal of Emerging and Selected Topics in Power Electronics

Maximizing the Power Generation of a Partially Shaded PV Array

The modules of a PV array receive different intensity of solar irradiation under partial shading condition and hence mismatch losses occurs between the modules. Multiple local maxima exist in the power-voltage characteristics of a PV array and out of multiple local maxima one of them is a global maximum power point (GMPP). This paper presents a new approach to distribute the shading effect over the entire array to reduce the mismatch losses, and enhance the power output of a PV array. In this approach, the physical position of the modules in the Total Cross Tied (TCT) configuration are arranged, without changing the electrical connection of the modules, and also the arrangement of the modules in the TCT configuration is done in such a way that, the shading effect is distributed over the entire array, and hence it reduces the multiple local maxima in power-voltage characteristics of a PV array. Thus the tracking of GMPP in the present approach is simpler. In this paper, the output power of a PV array estimated theoretically and by MATLAB simulation for the TCT and the proposed configuration is compared. It is investigated that, the power generation of a PV array with proposed configuration is improved compared to the TCT configuration under different shading patterns. © 2015 IEEE.

2015 IEEE Power, Communication and Information Technology Conference, PCITC 2015 - Proceedings

A novel approach to extract maximum power from partially shaded PV array

Experiments and numerical simulations were carried out for an evaporating sessile droplet. The droplet was confined in the narrow gap between two glass plates, making it a "Hele-Shaw" droplet and particle image velocimetry technique was used. In case of the evaporating droplet with pinned contact line and exposed to ambient condition, two symmetric but counterrotating convection cells were observed. After complete evaporation, the particles deposited on the substrate near the contact line. The direction of the flow was reversed for a droplet placed on uniformly heated substrate, and the final deposition pattern was a large spot at the center with a thin line at the periphery. For asymmetrically heated substrate a single convection cell appeared, and the final deposition was also asymmetric. When the liquid was subjected to localized heating, the contact line no longer remains pinned and a relatively uniform deposition was obtained after complete drying. © 2015 American Institute of Chemical Engineers.

Chemical Engineering

AIChE Journal

Internal fluid motion and particle transport in externally heated sessile droplets

This paper proposes an approach for event recognition in Egocentric videos using dense trajectories over Gradient Flow - Space Time Interest Point (GF-STIP) feature. We focus on recognizing events of diverse categories (including indoor and outdoor activities, sports and social activities and adventures) in egocentric videos. We introduce a dataset with diverse egocentric events, as all the existing egocentric activity recognition datasets consist of indoor videos only. The dataset introduced in this paper contains 102 videos with 9 different events (containing indoor and outdoor videos with varying lighting conditions). We extract Space Time Interest Points (STIP) from each frame of the video. The interest points are taken as the lead pixels and Gradient-Weighted Optical Flow (GWOF) features are calculated on the lead pixels by multiplying the optical ow measure and the magnitude of gradient at the pixel, to obtain the GF-STIP feature. We construct pose descriptors with the GF-STIP feature. We use the GF-STIP descriptors for recognizing events in egocentric videos with three different approaches: following a Bag of Words (BoW) model, implementing Fisher Vectors and obtaining dense trajectories for the videos. We show that the dense trajectory features based on the proposed GF-STIP descriptors enhance the efficacy of the event recognition system in egocentric videos. © 2016 ACM.

Computer Science and Engineering

ACM International Conference Proceeding Series

Event recognition in egocentric videos using a novel trajectory based feature

Surface modification is a promising method to solve the tribological problems in microsystems. To modify the surface, we fabricated hierarchical patterns with different pitches of nano-scale features and different surface chemistries. Micro- and nano-patterns with similar geometrical configurations were also fabricated for comparison. The nano-tribological behavior of the patterns was investigated using an atomic force microscope at different relative humidity levels (5\% to 80\%) and applied normal loads (40 nN to 120 nN) under a constant sliding velocity. The results showed significant enhancement in the de-wetting and tribological performance of the hierarchical patterns compared with those of flat and micro- and nano-patterned surfaces. The PTFE-coated hierarchical patterns showed similar dynamic contact angles (advancing and receding) to those of the real lotus leaf. The influence of relative humidity on adhesion and friction behavior was found to be significant for all the tested surfaces. The tribological performance was improved as the pitch of the nano-scale geometry of the hierarchical pattern increased, even though the wetting property was not influenced significantly. A model was proposed based on the role of intermolecular force to explain the effect of the pitch of the hierarchical patterns on the adhesion and friction behavior. According to the model based on the molecular force, the contact between a ball and the patterned surface was a multi-asperity contact, contrary to the single-asperity contact predicted by the Johnson-Kendall-Roberts (JKR) and Maugis-Dugdale (MD) models. The strong intermolecular forces, which are activated in the confined spaces between the adjacent nano-pillars and the ball, contributed to the contact area and hence the adhesion and friction forces. © The Royal Society of Chemistry 2016.

Mechanical Engineering

Soft Matter

Nanotribological and wetting performance of hierarchical patterns

Compression response of fine grained soils is generally modeled by bilinear relationship between void ratio (e) and logarithmic of effective stress (σ'). In general, compression curve of overconsolidated soil is nonlinear in nature as it varies smoothly from linear portion of initial part of the curve to the linear portion of the later part of the curve. The bilinear model is unable to represent the smooth transition of the compression curve. As a result, it leads to an overestimation of the settlement and introduces a kink in the predicted stress-strain relationship of overconsolidated soil from the elasto-plasticity model wherein it is used as a component defining volumetric hardening. The present paper proposes a simple three parameters transitional plasticity model to predict the compression response of clayey soil more accurately. The proposed model considers that the irrecoverable deformation due to relative sliding between the adjacent particle and particle groups has possibility from beginning of the loading in over-consolidated region as well. © ASCE.