IIT Madras is a public technical and research university located in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. Founded in 1959, it is recognised as an Institute of National Importance.

IIT Madras has been ranked as the top engineering institute in India for four years in a row by the National Institutional Ranking Framework of the MHRD

It currently offers undergraduate, postgraduate and research degrees across 16 disciplines in Engineering, Sciences, Humanities and Management. About 596 faculty belonging to science and engineering departments and centres of the Institute are engaged in teaching, research and industrial consultancy.

IIT Madras

Nacre, a composite layer present in sea-shells, exhibits a remarkable combination of toughness, strength, and stiffness through its brick–mortar micro-structure, acting as a template for novel materials. Strength, one of nacre's important properties is highly variable due to distribution of underlying material's properties as well as various defects present in its micro-structure. Presently, researchers assume the Weakest-link hypothesis and consequently use the Weibull distribution to model this variability. However, this assumption is theoretically unproven for biological materials such as Nacre and extrapolation of the same to predict rare but catastrophic behavior would be incorrect. In this article, the suitability of Weibull distribution to account for the variability of strength in nacre is tested, using multi-scale models, developed using FEM. Through Monte Carlo based numerical experiments and Renormalization Group (RG) based arguments, it is shown that the Weakest-link hypothesis, which is commonly used to justify the use of the Weibull distribution, does not seem to hold for nacre. Micromechanics and non-local homogenization based distributions such as the one suggested by Luo and Bazant (2019) might be more appropriate for accurate extrapolation to the low probability tail. © 2021 Elsevier Ltd

World University root node

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences

Mechanics of Materials

Testing Weibull as a viable statistical strength distribution for Nacre

Brakes are very important component in any vehicle, used to stop the motion of it either by applying mechanical or hydraulic pressure on brake pads. By engaging and disengaging of braking action, the surface of brake components (or) materials is ruined after some time. Therefore, it is important to study and develop a new composition of brake materials which provides optimum coefficient of friction along with increasing wear resistance to the materials. Hence, new combination has been formulated for fabrication of brake composite material using powder metallurgy method which consist of copper-tin alloy mixed with silicon carbide as a base materials, aluminium oxide as an abrasive material with varying volume percentage of graphite and talc powder as a friction modifiers. The pin-on-disc test was performed on brake composite material to analyse their tribological properties namely friction and wear. From tribo-test, it was observed that all composites give the friction coefficient in the range of ∼0.33–0.51 and the loss of materials in the range of ∼79–131 mg. Further, the mechanical, thermal stability and surface characterization were also carried out on brake composites using universal testing machine, vicker’s hardness tester, thermogravimetric analyser and scanning electron microscope respectively. These results reveal a very marginal change in hardness, increase in compressive strength by increase of talc concentration to the matrix, uniform distribution of reinforcement into the matrix and multi stage degradation of material loss in thermograph. © IMechE 2020.

Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part J: Journal of Engineering Tribology

Effect of friction modifiers compositions on tribological properties of Cu-Sn alloy/Al2O3 brake composite material

Field studies on household water treatment and safe storage (HWTS) suggest that positive health outcomes are strongly linked to user compliance. We investigated factors that influenced compliance in a marginalized community of South India where residents worked with researchers to develop a water treatment intervention in absence of government water utilities. Survey and water quality data were collected during a 12-month randomized controlled trial of 124 households. Data were used to construct indices for social, technical, and institutional predictors of compliance including technological effectiveness, gender, community capacity, perceived benefit, and inherent demand. Perceived benefit was the only parameter to be significantly associated with compliance. Households in which participants had “very high” levels of perceived benefit were over 4 times more likely to comply with instructions on water treatment and maintenance with the HWTS. These findings suggest that compliance, and therefore disease prevention, can be improved by enhancing perceived benefit to the user. © 2017, © The Author(s) 2017.

Public Works Management and Policy

Assessing Participant Compliance With Point-of-Use Water Treatment: An Exploratory Investigation

This article presents a modified water poverty index that captures several waterscape attributes to better understand complex issues surrounding water. Household surveys (n = 300), water quality tests (n = 375) and qualitative methods were deployed to examine 14 post-tsunami settlements in Nagapattinam and Karaikal Districts (India) through the lens of water. Data were used to develop a contextualized, participant-driven water poverty index to measure water poverty at several scales. Statistical tests revealed significant differences between the two districts (p ≤.0001) and between rural and urban areas within each district (p ≤.0001). Three weight schemes (one dictated entirely by research participants) produced analogous outcomes though predicated on different indicator arrangements. © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Department Of Civil Engineering

International Journal of Water Resources Development

Development and application of a multi-scalar, participant-driven water poverty index in post-tsunami India

Kerala, a state in Southwestern India, evolved into a prominent international tourism destination primarily by linking tourism experiences with nature. Although sufficient significance has been accorded to tourism as a development strategy in Kerala, tourism’s contributions to the development processes and the sustainability of tourism activities remain unexplored. Though tourism impacts have been extensively studied, researchers have rarely compared socio-cultural transformations in destinations with and without a planned intervention in tourism. This paper compares residents’ perceptions on socio-cultural impacts of tourism at Kumily and Kumarakom in Kerala. The article explores whether tourism activities in Kumily, with its planned intervention, are more sustainable than in Kumarakom, without any interventions. The conversion of ex-poachers into forest protectors and the involvement of the marginalized people in community-based ecotourism are a few among the many transformations that have occurred at Kumily while haphazard tourism development at Kumarakom gave rise to several socio-cultural challenges. Primary data were collected through residents’ survey, and the findings indicate that Kumily with its planned intervention has a more sustainable tourism development pattern than Kumarakom. © 2009 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. All rights reserved.

Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change

Socio-cultural transformations through tourism: A comparison of residents’ perspectives at two destinations in Kerala, India

According to the new growth theory, the advancement of knowledge is a key determinant of long-term economic growth. Spillovers of knowledge (external effect on human capital) across firms can help prevent the phenomenon of diminishing returns to the accumulation of capital formation. In addition, one commodity that increases by giving/sharing is knowledge. Besides, knowledge is critical not only to economic growth, but also to any society's long-term development.&nbsp;

Knowledge Economy: The Indian Challenge

Identifying new knowledge streams in the evolving knowledge economy

One of the critical components of a successful knowledge economy is networking. Networks may be defined simply as linkage of points or nodes such that movement may occur from one of the points to any other point. Networks are nodes connected by links (Barabási 2002).&nbsp;

Networking of Knowledge Institutions

The systematic organization of knowledge production and control provides a co-ordination mechanism to the social system in addition to the traditional mechanisms of economic exchange and political decision making. In other words, university–industry–government relations develop in terms of institutional arrangements for three major functions of the socio-economic system.&nbsp;