Department of Applied Mechanics

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

Flexible structures are continuum modeled as infinite degrees of freedom. Most of the time finite element models are made with large number of degrees-of-freedom to analyse flexible structures. Continuous monitoring, analysis and control of dynamics of flexible structures need simulation of large degrees of freedom in real time. This is computationally expensive and realtime control fails. This study focuses on the development of a reduced order framework for dynamics of flexible structures and use the reduced order model for controlling the structure. Essentially, in the proposed framework, full order state space obtained from finite element modeling of the flexible structure has been reduced to lower subspace using a reduced order algorithm keeping the dynamical characteristic intact. The transformation matrix for reduction has been calculated using system equivalent reduction expansion process (SEREP). Traditionally, full order dynamical system is being used to find the gain matrix to suppress the uncontrolled dynamics associated with the dynamical system. Here in this methodology, the reduced dimension of state space of the system is used for estimating the gain matrix using optimal linear quadratic regulator (LQR). The gain obtained through the reduced system is subsequently used as a feedback to the attached actuators which produce the required force to control the system. A numerical example of a flexible cantilever beam has been shown to investigate the effectiveness of the algorithm. © 2020, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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SEREP Integrated Control of Flexible Structures

Recently, researchers have shown an increased interest in ultrasound imaging methods alternate to conventional focused beamforming (CFB). One such approach is based on the synthetic aperture (SA) scheme; more popular are the ones based on synthetic transmit aperture (STA) schemes with a single-element transmit or multielement STA (MSTA). However, one of the main challenges in translating such methods to low-cost ultrasound systems is the tradeoffs among image quality, frame rate, and complexity of the system. These schemes use all the transducer elements during receive, which dictates a corresponding number of parallel receive channels, thus increasing the complexity of the system. A considerable amount of literature has been published on compressed sensing (CS) for SA imaging. Such studies are aimed at reducing the number of transmissions in SA but still recover images of acceptable quality at high frame rate and fail to address the complexity due to full-aperture receive. In this work, we adopt a CS framework to MSTA, with a motivation to reduce the number of receive elements and data. The CS recovery performance was assessed for the simulation data, tissue-mimicking phantom data, and an example in vivo biceps data. It was found that in spite of using 50% receive elements and overall using only 12.5% of the data, the images recovered using CS were comparable to those of reference full-aperture case in terms of estimated lateral resolution, contrast-to-noise ratio, and structural similarity indices. Thus, the proposed CS framework provides some fresh insights into translating the MSTA imaging method to affordable ultrasound scanners. © 1986-2012 IEEE.

IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control

Compressed Sensing Approach for Reducing the Number of Receive Elements in Synthetic Transmit Aperture Imaging

Multistable laminates have been widely analyzed in the recent past for their potential in morphing applications. However, all the analytical models developed up until now have taken into account only the free-free boundary condition. In this work two objectives are met: (a) an analytical model is developed, which extends the previously available models in literature to account for the cantilever boundary condition for a special class of hybrid bistable symmetric laminates (HBSL); (b) the previously proposed HBSL is modified by replacing the aluminum layers with bi-direction glass-epoxy prepregs in the layup. It is observed that the modified layup has a curvature similar to the previously proposed HBSL while maintaining bistability. The analytical model developed here successfully captures the equilibrium shapes and the snap-through behavior for this special class of laminates which is validated against the results obtained using ABAQUS® and experiments. The developed model is then subsequently used to study the design space and bistability characteristics of the HBSL and the proposed modified layup (m-HBSL) in the cantilever boundary condition. © 2020 Elsevier Ltd

Composite Structures

Modeling and design of a class of hybrid bistable symmetric laminates with cantilever boundary configuration

Normal thermal fluctuations of the cell membrane have been studied extensively using high resolution microscopy and focused light, particularly at the peripheral regions of a cell. We use a single probe particle attached non-specifically to the cell-membrane to determine that the power spectral density is proportional to (frequency)-5/3 in the range of 5 Hz to 1 kHz. We also use a new technique to simultaneously ascertain the slope fluctuations of the membrane by relying upon the determination of pitch motion of the birefringent probe particle trapped in linearly polarized optical tweezers. In the process, we also develop the technique to identify pitch rotation to a high resolution using optical tweezers. We find that the power spectrum of slope fluctuations is proportional to (frequency)-1, which we also explain theoretically. We find that we can extract parameters like bending rigidity directly from the coefficient of the power spectrum particularly at high frequencies, instead of being convoluted with other parameters, thereby improving the accuracy of estimation. We anticipate this technique for determination of the pitch angle in spherical particles to high resolution as a starting point for many interesting studies using the optical tweezers. This journal is © The Royal Society of Chemistry.

Department Of Physics

Soft Matter

Detection of sub-degree angular fluctuations of the local cell membrane slope using optical tweezers

Multiphase materials, such as composite materials, exhibit multiple competing failure mechanisms during the growth of a macroscopic defect. For the simulation of the overall fracture process in such materials, we develop a two-phase spring network model that accounts for the architecture between the different components as well as the respective disorders in their failure characteristics. In the specific case of a plain weave architecture, we show that any offset between the layers reduces the delocalization of the stresses at the crack tip and thereby substantially lowers the strength and fracture toughness of the overall laminate. The avalanche statistics of the broken springs do not show a distinguishable dependence on the offsets between layers. The power-law exponents are found to be much smaller than that of disordered spring network models in the absence of a crack. A discussion is developed on the possibility of the avalanche statistics being those near breakdown. © 2020 American Physical Society.

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Department of Ocean Engineering

Physical Review E

Role of spatial patterns in fracture of disordered multiphase materials

Multiple cores in a tiled multi-core processor are connected using a network-on-chip mechanism. All these cores share the last-level cache (LLC). For large-sized LLCs, generally, non-uniform cache architecture design is considered, where the LLC is split into multiple slices. Accessing highly shared cache blocks from an LLC slice by several cores simultaneously results in congestion at the LLC, which in turn increases the access latency. To deal with this issue, we propose a congestion management technique in the LLC that equips the NoC router with small storage to keep a copy of heavily shared cache blocks. To identify highly shared cache blocks, we also propose a prediction classifier in the LLC controller. We implement our technique in Sniper, an architectural simulator for multi-core systems, and evaluate its effectiveness by running a set of parallel benchmarks. Our experimental results show that the proposed technique is effective in reducing the LLC access time. © 2020 IEEE.

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Proceedings - IEEE International Conference on Computer Design: VLSI in Computers and Processors

Router Buffer Caching for Managing Shared Cache Blocks in Tiled Multi-Core Processors

Conventional text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis requires extensive linguistic processing for producing quality output. The advent of end-to-end (E2E) systems has caused a relocation in the paradigm with better synthesized voices. However, hidden Markov model (HMM) based systems are still popular due to their fast synthesis time, robustness to less training data, and flexible adaptation of voice characteristics, speaking styles, and emotions. This paper proposes a technique that combines the classical parametric HMM-based TTS framework (HTS) with the neural-network-based Waveglow vocoder using histogram equalization (HEQ) in a low resource environment. The two paradigms are combined by performing HEQ across mel-spectrograms extracted from HTS generated audio and source spectra of training data. During testing, the synthesized mel-spectrograms are mapped to the source spectrograms using the learned HEQ. Experiments are carried out on Hindi male and female dataset of the Indic TTS database. Systems are evaluated based on degradation mean opinion scores (DMOS). Results indicate that the synthesis quality of the hybrid system is better than that of the conventional HTS system. These results are quite promising as they pave way to good quality TTS systems with less data compared to E2E systems. Copyright © 2020 ISCA

Department of Aerospace Engineering

Department Of Biotechnology

Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH

A hybrid HMM-Waveglow based text-to-speech synthesizer using histogram equalization for low resource Indian languages

Camber morphing is an effective way to control the lift generated in any airfoil and potentially improve airfoil efficiency (lift-drag ratio). This can be especially useful for fixed wing UAVs undergoing different flying manoeuvres and flight phases. This work investigates the aerodynamic characteristics of NACA0012 airfoil morphed by the Single Corrugated Variable Camber (SCVC) morphing and Double Corrugated Variable Camber (DCVC) morphing approach. The airfoil is reconstructed from the camber line using a Radial Basis Function (RBF) based interpolation method (J. H. S. Fincham and M. I. Friswell, “Aerodynamic optimisation of a camber morphing aerofoil,” Aerosp. Sci. Technol., 2015). The aerodynamic analysis is done by employing two different finite volume solvers: OpenFOAM and ANSYS-Fluent, and a panel method code (XFoil). Results reveal that the aerodynamic coefficients predicted by the two finite-volume solvers using a fully turbulent flow assumption are similar but differ from those predicted by XFoil. The aerodynamic performance of morphed airfoils are nearly equal or lower than that of the baseline airfoil at lower values of coefficient of lift whilst at large values of the morphed airfoils display superior aerodynamic performance. At identical morphing angles, the aerodynamic characteristics of SCVC and DCVC airfoils are almost identical. Finally, it is observed for a fixed angle of attack, that an optimum morphing angle exists for which the aerodynamic efficiency becomes maximum. © 2020, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Inc, AIAA. All rights reserved.

AIAA AVIATION 2020 FORUM

Numerical study of camber morphing in naca0012 airfoil

This chapter focuses on investigating the phenomenon of intermittency in the dynamical behavior of aeroelastic systems. To that end, a classical two degree-of freedom pitch plunge aeroelastic system is considered as the representative aeroelastic model. Investigations are first carried out on the route to aeroelastic flutter in fluctuating flow conditions through wind tunnel experiments. The recurring nature of intermittent periodic bursts observed in the pre-flutter response are subsequently utilized to develop quantitative measures using time series based tools, that can serve as precursors to flutter instability. To gain further insights into the experimental observations, numerical investigations are carried out using a well known two degree-of-freedom pitch plunge mathematical model for the aeroelastic system. A stochastic bifurcation analysis is also carried out that provide insights into the noise induced dynamical stability characteristics. Finally, a detailed study is undertaken to investigate the physical mechanisms that lead to the appearance of intermittency. Particularly, the effect of time scales of the flow fluctuations are investigated.

Intermittency in a Pitch-Plunge Aeroelastic System

Fluid–elastic systems nearing dynamic instabilities are known to be sensitive to fluctuations in fluid flow. A cantilever plate in axial flow with random temporal fluctuations, is examined numerically for its dynamical behaviour. The numerical model comprises of a nonlinear structural model for the flexible plate, coupled with unsteady lumped vortex model for the fluid forces. As the mean flow velocity is increased, the system transitions to limit cycle oscillations from a state of rest, through a regime of intermittent oscillations. The conditions for onset and disappearance of intermittency are discussed and are interpreted using stochastic bifurcation theories. While the onset of intermittency is found to be unaffected by the time scales of the flow fluctuations, they are observed to affect the length of the intermittency regime. The effect of plate flexibility on intermittency is also discussed. © 2019 Elsevier Ltd