BITS Pilani Research Articles

Predictive Modeling of Solar PV Panel Operating Temperature over Water Bodies: Comparative Performance Analysis with Ground-Mounted Installations

Solar panel efficiency is significantly influenced by its operating temperature. Recent advancements in emerging renewable energy alternatives have enabled photovoltaic (PV) module installation over water bodies, leveraging their increased efficiency and associated benefits. This paper examines the operational performance of solar panels placed over water bodies, comparing them to ground-mounted solar PV installations. Regression models for panel temperature are developed based on experimental setups at BITS Pilani, India. Developed regression models, including linear, quadratic, and exponential, are utilized to predict the operating temperature of solar PV installations above water bodies. These models incorporated parameters such as ambient temperature, solar insolation, wind velocity, water temperature, and humidity. Among these, the one-degree regression models with three parameters outperformed the models with four or five parameters with a prediction error of 5.5 °C. Notably, the study found that the annual energy output estimates from the best model had an error margin of less than 0.2% compared to recorded data. Research indicates that solar PV panels over water bodies produce approximately 2.59% more annual energy output than ground-mounted systems. The newly developed regression models provide a predictive tool for estimating the operating temperature of solar PV installations above water bodies, using only three meteorological parameters: ambient temperature, solar insolation, and wind velocity, for accurate temperature prediction.

"Scientific temper reflects the high values of science: truth seeking, objectivity and honesty" - An interview with Prof. Goverdhan Mehta

Goverdhan Mehta was born on 26 June 1943 and received his BSc and MSc from the BITS Pilani and Ph.D. from Pune University. Following post-doctoral research at the Michigan State University under Prof. Don Farnum and at the Ohio State University under Prof. Paul G. Gassman, he joined IIT Kanpur in 1969. From 1977-1998, Mehta was a Professor of Chemistry and Vice-Chancellor at the University of Hyderabad. From 1998-2005 he was the Director of the Indian Institute of Science. Since 2010, he has been a distinguished university professor and Dr. Kallam Anji Reddy Chair at the Department of Chemistry, University of Hyderabad. Mehta has authored over 550 research papers.

Teaching English to Law Students: Interview with Suman Luhach, School of Law, Bennett University, India

She received her Ph.D. from BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus, in 2017. Her observations on college students’ endeavors to pen down their ideas led her to choose Scaffolding Writing Skills for Indian College Students as her doctoral research topic. The work has contributed to understanding the importance of learning management systems to maximally impact classroom instruction of writing skills through a learner-centric, collaborative approach. After being awarded the institutional fellowship in 2011, She taught courses like Technical Communication, Technical Report Writing, and Effective Public Speaking at BITS Pilani to UG and PG students. Before this, She did M. Phil. in English Literature from MGS University, Bikaner, in 2009 and wrote a dissertation on the works of V S Naipaul from a Postcolonial perspective. She qualified for UGC NET (English - Language and Literature) in 2012. While doing a short-term course with RELO, US Embassy, in 2012, She was awarded Outstanding Achievement in Exploring Web 2.0: Tools for classroom teaching and professional development. During her Master (in English Literature), She received Prof. SBL Rawat Memorial Trust Award for achieving the second rank at the University level. She also wrote a dissertation on comparative analysis of G B Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra and William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra in MA. Her research areas are Teaching of Writing Skills in Language Classrooms at Tertiary Level, Online Collaborative Language Learning, literary theories, and Contemporary Drama. She has also served as the co-convenor of Departmental seminars in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, BITS Pilani in 2013-14. She was a member of the editorial committee of BITS CAN- a biannual BITS Pilani magazine, and the organizing committee for the International Conference Interfacing Language, Culture and Technology.

Laundry greywater treatment by anaerobic filters and vertical flow constructed wetlands

AbstractLaundry processes are huge water consumers and contribute to wastewaters in high volume. In the current report, treatment of greywater (GW) was studied from commercial laundry in BITS Pilani, KK Birla Goa Campus, India, which produces around 2–2.5 m3/day of GW. Source laundry GW showed physicochemical parameters like chemical oxygen demand (COD), biochemical oxygen demand (BOD5), ammoniacal N (NH4–N), nitrate (NO3–N), nitrite (NO2–N), orthophosphate (PO4–P) and pH in the range of 600–650 mg/L, 350–370 mg/L, 9–12 mg/L, 15–21 mg/L, 14–22 mg/L, 28–35 mg/L and 7.48–8.10, respectively. The treatment system included French‐type two‐stage vertical flow constructed wetland (VFCW) preceded by anaerobic filter tank filled with 3D plastic support. Wetland beds were made up of sand and gravel as filter media, and Canna indica was used as macrophyte. Pretreatment by anaerobic filter resulted in the increase in residence time of GW and reduction of pollutant load to wetland beds, thus preventing clogging of Stage 1 wetland. Sampling and water quality data analysis was performed weekly for 26 weeks. Outlet pollutant levels showed 96.35% removal of organic matter, 79.93% removal of nitrogen and 95.04% removal of orthophosphates. The pH of outlet water was 7.35, which is well below discharge permissible limits. Treated water quality was below Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), India, permissible limits for discharge, and the cost of treating GW by the system is 1.11 USD/m3 which is very feasible in country like India. Treated water is suitable for nonpotable options like gardening of central lawns in BITS Pilani Goa, floor cleaning of laundry and construction purpose.

Internet of Learning Factories to Support the Teaching & Learning Experience on Distributed Production Systems and Blockchain Networks

Global supply chains can be regarded as increasingly complex networks of Distributed Production Systems. They often lack transparency and do not allow the tracing of products. To overcome these limitations and to achieve more efficient and sustainable value streams, the implementation of blockchain technology as a data management system is a promising approach. However, there is a wide gap between theory and practice. By interconnecting globally distributed learning factories, global supply chains can be simulated. In this regard, learning factories have the potential to contribute overcoming this gap by enabling learners to gain practical knowledge and to simulate production systems and processes on a small scale. This paper introduces the concept of the Internet of Learning Factories enabling practitioners to test application concepts in the context of distributed production, e.g. blockchain technologies. The concept is implemented in the Indo-German Center for Sustainable Manufacturing, a cooperation between Technische Universitat Braunschweig, Germany, and BITS Pilani, India, and improves the teaching and learning experience within a joint student seminar.

A real time implementation of interline dynamic voltage restorer for improvement of power quality

Voltage deviations which occur frequently in the form of voltage sag/swell cause severe disturbances and damage sensitive loads present on the distribution side of power system. One of the feasible solutions to mitigate these voltage sags/swells is by utilising FACTS devices. The FACTS device proposed in this paper is interline dynamic voltage restorer (IDVR) which contains two or more dynamic voltage restorers (DVR) with a common DC link. In this paper, IDVR is designed for a specific application to mitigate power quality problems in an existing real time load. A case study of the load network data of BITS Pilani Hyderabad Campus in Telangana, India which is spread over 200 acres is considered as the real time load. Various multiple voltage sag/swell scenarios are analysed in the real time load. The results have proven that the IDVR can effectively mitigate multiple voltage sags/swells in the considered real time load.

A real time implementation of interline dynamic voltage restorer for improvement of power quality

Voltage deviations which occur frequently in the form of voltage sag/swell cause severe disturbances and damage sensitive loads present on the distribution side of power system. One of the feasible solutions to mitigate these voltage sags/swells is by utilising FACTS devices. The FACTS device proposed in this paper is interline dynamic voltage restorer (IDVR) which contains two or more dynamic voltage restorers (DVR) with a common DC link. In this paper, IDVR is designed for a specific application to mitigate power quality problems in an existing real time load. A case study of the load network data of BITS Pilani Hyderabad Campus in Telangana, India which is spread over 200 acres is considered as the real time load. Various multiple voltage sag/swell scenarios are analysed in the real time load. The results have proven that the IDVR can effectively mitigate multiple voltage sags/swells in the considered real time load.

International Conference on Recent Advances in Fluid and Thermal Sciences (iCRAFT2018) at BITS Pilani Dubai Campus

BITS Pilani, Dubai campus invited delegates from academia and industry to be a part of three days international conference on Recent Advances in Fluid and Thermal Sciences.BITS Pilani, Dubai campus invites delegates from academia and industry to be a part of three days international conference on Recent Advances in Fluid and Thermal Sciences (iCRAFT 2018), which started from 5th December 2018 and ended on 7th December at their Dubai Campus.The conference aimed to bring together the leading academic scientists, researchers and research scholars to exchange and share their experiences and research results about all aspects of Mechanical Engineering. It also provides the premier interdisciplinary forum for researchers, practitioners and educators to present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, and concerns, practical challenges encountered and the solution adopted in the field of Mechanical Engineering. The Conference covered various topics of interest including Bluff Body and High-speed Flows, Microscale Transport, Hydraulics and Turbomachinery, Conduction and Convection, Renewable Energy, Alternate Fuels and Sustainability.

Influence of metacognitive awareness on engineering students’ performance: a study of listening skills

Abstract Educative learning equips learners not with a mechanical set of skills but with a fertile thinking that enables them to holistically nurture their knowledge and skills. Metacognitive awareness, an advanced understanding and execution of skills helps learners not only acquire knowledge of their own cognitive processes but also manage learning activities. This paper aims to trace the impact of metacognition on the extent of the learning (listening skills), the difference between the levels of understanding (assumed and attained), learning of the performance and application of theoretical knowledge of listening skills among engineering students. The study proposes a five-step AWARE concept of metacognition to help the learners become more aware of and reflect on their learning. The study has used consecutive sampling technique and participants are engineering students of BITS Pilani, India. Engineering students assume that their level and clarity of awareness is very high but the findings do not support their assumption. There is a gap in the theoretical acquisition and practical applicability. Metacognition helps learners understand what they know, what they do not know, what they learn, and how they learn. Understanding of and clarity about the process of learning would enable the engineering students to use their listening skills in the learning factories to facilitate the sharing of information.

AA-CDNB: adaptive autoregressive CAVIAR-dragonfly optimization with Naive Bayes for reason identification

Sentiment analysis is the critical process, which generates the subjective information from the text documents that are available online. Literature presents various kinds of task, like sentiment classification, affect classification, reason identification, and predictive analysis and so on, for sentiment analysis. This work brings the reason identification system from the classified sentiment and the affect classes through the automation of the optimization techniques. The proposed adaptive autoregressive conditional autoregressive value at risk-dragonfly optimization with Naive Bayes (AA-CDNB) algorithm finds the reasons behind the sentiments present in the tweets by joining the dragonfly algorithm and the Naive Bayes classifier. Also, the proposed model utilizes the tangential weighted moving average (TWMA) model, for predicting the sentiment reasons to appear shortly. The experimentation of the proposed work utilizes the BITS PILANI tweets database for the simulation and further, the results are compared with various models. The proposed AA-CDNB model has outclassed other models with the values of 1, 0.888, and 0.920, for the sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy metrics, respectively. Also, the results of the TWMA prediction model is compared with the other models based on the error performance, and it is proved that the TWMA model has improved results.

Measuring Carbon Footprint of an Indian University Using Life Cycle Assessment

This paper presents carbon footprint of Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani (BITS Pilani), Pilani campus, India using the life cycle analysis (LCA). The direct emissions of university owned facilities, indirect energy emissions of purchased electricity, heat or steam, and other indirect emissions, which are the outcomes of university activities but controlled by other organizations have been considered for the greenhouse gas emissions. Various emissions are modelled in Umberto NXT Universal software using ISO 14064 standards. It has been found that the contribution of indirect emissions is 99%. This study highlights the need of formulating policies to reduce such emissions. The results have been compared with the other university results available in the literature.

Transferring experience labs for production engineering students to universities in newly industrialized countries

The Indian economy is one of the fastest growing economies in the world and the demand for the skilled engineers is increasing. Subsequently the Indian education sector is growing to provide the necessary number of skilled engineers. Current Indian engineering graduates have broad theoretical background but lack in methodological, soft and practical skills. To bridge this gap, the experience lab ideas from the engineering education at “Die Lernfabrik” (learning factory) of the Technische Universität Braunschweig (TU Braunschweig) is transferred to the Birla Institute of Technology and Science in Pilani (BITS Pilani), India. This Lernfabrik successfully strengthened the methodological, soft and practical skills of the TU Braunschweig production-engineering graduates. The target group is discrete manufacturing education with focusing on energy and resource efficiency as well as cyber physical production systems. As the requirements of industry and academia in India differs from Germany, the transfer of the experience lab to the Indian education system needs special attention to realize a successful transfer project. This publication provides a unique approach to systematically transfer the educational concept in Learning Factory from a specific university environment to a different environment in a newly industrialized country. The help of a bilateral university driven practice partnership between the two universities creates a lighthouse for the Indian university environment.

Comparative Analysis for Solar Energy Based Learning Factory: Case Study for TU Braunschweig and BITS Pilani

Now day's solar energy is widely used for replacing the conventional sources of energy for power generation. The electrical power could be generated from photovoltaic (PV) systems. With this approach, an attempt has been made to address the possibility to use solar energy systems for running a learning factory(s) (LF) in Technische Universität (TU), Braunschweig, Germany. For this, the energy consumption of each component of learning factory has been measured experimentally at various operating conditions like idle, loading, and unloading. The same analysis has been carried out for the components of LF at BITS Pilani followed by performing a comparative analysis. It is observed that the solar energy based LF system will works better in Pilani due to higher solar insolation and 300 number of sunny days. In the end, the economic analysis to replace the conventional system with solar system is carried out followed by assessment of carbon emissions of the LF components for two types of electricity. It was found out that the payback period comes out to be 15.7 years and 9.1 years for Pilani and Braunschweig respectively with 6-hours battery backup.

CONSTRUCTION OF COMPOSITE INDEX OF LEADING INDICATORS FOR FDI CYCLE FOR BRICS ECONOMIES.

20Dec 2016 CONSTRUCTION OF COMPOSITE INDEX OF LEADING INDICATORS FOR FDI CYCLE FOR BRICS ECONOMIES. Dinesh Kumar Choudhury and Rajendra Narayan Paramanik. Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning Prasanthi Nilayam-515 134, Andhra Pradesh, India. Assistant Professor, Department of Economics & Finance, BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus, Vidya Vihar- 333031, Rajasthan, India.

Power Quality Conditioning of PV-Wind Microgrid to Provide Harmonic Reactive Power Compensation using Series APF

Objectives: In this analysis, PV-Wind Microgrid with real time environmental conditions is compensated for harmonics and reactive power. Methods/Analysis: Microgrids suffer from many power quality problems which require harmonic and reactive power compensation being connected with different sources and loads. In this regard, initially a microgrid has been developed using the data from the weather monitoring system in BITS Pilani, Hyderabad Campus. Later compensation requirement has been identified and Series APF with its unique control is applied to provide power quality enhancement. Findings: The microgrid suitable for all practical conditions is developed to give an equivalent output of conventional 3 phase distribution system and the variations in the power flows causing power quality issues are observed when connected to dynamically varying reactive loads. By using Series APF in microgrid, these issues like voltage swells and sags are mitigated and thus the reactive power compensation is provided. The % THD of voltage harmonics in the microgrid is effectively improved using the novel control technique that has been implemented. Novelty/Improvement: Power quality improvement in microgrids using active power filter topology specifically in islanded mode, Identity Vector Template Generation Approach specifically towards harmonic compensation.

Content analysis of process based writing in web-supported environment at bits Pilani and its possible implications

A digital environment for instructional purposes has been adopted in the form of a Learning Management System (LMS) by educational institutions. The present study facilitates incorporation of online writing tutorials over LMS ‘Nalanda’ BITS Pilani with the objective of understanding the nature of the writing process while students accomplish their writing tasks on online forums. A paragogical framework has also been devised by keeping scaffolding as the theoretical basis of learning. The methodological strategy adopted to realize the objective and analyze the impact of the educational intervention was content analysis. Results of the content analysis, under the parameters corresponding to different stages of the writing process, suggest that students’ emphasis had been more on content development and critical thinking.

Phyco-diversity of Birla Talab in BITS Pilani of Jhunjhunu District (Raj.) India

Phyco-diversity of Birla Talab in BITS Pilani of Jhunjhunu District (Raj.) India

Analysis of CPV System Vis-à-Vis SPV System for an Educational Institution In India

This paper presents the undertaken attempt to perform techno –economic analysis of water cooled concentrating photo voltaic (CPV) system vis-à-vis solar photovoltaic (SPV) for an educational institution (BITS Pilani Hyderabad). With the help of preliminary and final energy auditing, the energy requirements for the 2800 hostel rooms of the campus were computed. Required PV & CPV systems’ techno-economic analyses to meet the energy loads were performed and a comparison was made to arrive at the possibility of using CPV systems. Area required for installing both the system was also performed.

Gyrase ATPase domain as an antitubercular drug discovery platform: structure-based design and lead optimization of nitrothiazolyl carboxamide analogues.

In this study, we explored the pharmaceutically underexploited mycobacterial gyrase ATPase (GyrB) domain as a template for a structure-based virtual screening of our in-house (BITS Pilani) compound collection to discover new inhibitors targeting Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M.tb.) The hit identified was further customized by using a combination of molecular docking and medicinal chemistry strategies to obtain an optimized analogue displaying considerable in vitro enzyme efficacy and bactericidal properties against the M.tb. H37 Rv strain. The binding affinity of the ligand toward the GyrB domain was reascertained by differential scanning fluorimetry experiments. Further evaluation of the hERG toxicity (a major limitation among the previously reported N-linked aminopiperidine analogues) indicated these molecules to be completely devoid of cardiotoxicity, a significant achievement within this class.

Contributors

Contributors