Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur

About: Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur is a education organization based out in Kharagpur, India. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Natural rubber & Dielectric. The organization has 16887 authors who have published 38658 publications receiving 714526 citations.

Bimetallic Pt–Ni nanoparticles can catalyze reduction of aromatic nitro compounds by sodium borohydride in aqueous solution

Abstract: Bimetallic Pt–Ni nanoparticles (bi-MNPs) have been prepared at room temperature by a wet chemical technique from a micellar solution containing the corresponding metal salts. Co-reduction of the salts produced alloyed particles in bulk quantity. Use of different ratios of the respective metal salts supported the synthesis of tunable compositions of the Pt–Ni alloys. These alloyed bi-MNPs of variable compositions were exploited to study their catalytic activities towards the reduction of aromatic nitro compounds. The kinetics of the reduction was monitored under different experimental conditions. The catalytic activity of the Pt–Ni bi-MNPs has been found to be superior to the activities of monometallic Pt nanoparticles. Moreover, it was found that the rate of reduction of nitroaromatics is sensitive to the composition of the alloy catalysts. This could be attributed to the electronic effect and the segregation behavior of the material in the alloy.

A fuzzy multiobjective approach for network reconfiguration of distribution systems

Abstract: This paper presents an algorithm for network reconfiguration based on the heuristic rules and fuzzy multiobjective approach. Multiple objectives are considered for load balancing among the feeders and also to minimize the real power loss, deviation of nodes voltage, and branch current constraint violation, while subject to a radial network structure in which all loads must be energized. These four objectives are modeled with fuzzy sets to evaluate their imprecise nature and one can provide his or her anticipated value of each objective. Heuristic rules are also incorporated in the algorithm for minimizing the number of tie-switch operations. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through an example.

Automatic Facial Expression Recognition Using Features of Salient Facial Patches

Abstract: Extraction of discriminative features from salient facial patches plays a vital role in effective facial expression recognition. The accurate detection of facial landmarks improves the localization of the salient patches on face images. This paper proposes a novel framework for expression recognition by using appearance features of selected facial patches. A few prominent facial patches, depending on the position of facial landmarks, are extracted which are active during emotion elicitation. These active patches are further processed to obtain the salient patches which contain discriminative features for classification of each pair of expressions, thereby selecting different facial patches as salient for different pair of expression classes. One-against-one classification method is adopted using these features. In addition, an automated learning-free facial landmark detection technique has been proposed, which achieves similar performances as that of other state-of-art landmark detection methods, yet requires significantly less execution time. The proposed method is found to perform well consistently in different resolutions, hence, providing a solution for expression recognition in low resolution images. Experiments on CK+ and JAFFE facial expression databases show the effectiveness of the proposed system.

Impact of Network Reconfiguration on Loss Allocation of Radial Distribution Systems

Abstract: This paper presents allocation of power losses to consumers connected to radial distribution networks before and after network reconfiguration in a deregulated environment. Loss allocation is made in a quadratic way and it is based on identifying the real and imaginary parts of current in each branch, and losses are allocated to consumers. The network reconfiguration algorithm is based on the fuzzy multiobjective approach and the max-min principle is adopted for the multiobjective optimization in a fuzzy framework. Multiple objectives are considered for real-power loss reduction in which nodes voltage deviation is kept within a range, and an absolute value of branch currents is not allowed to exceed their rated capacities. At the same time, a radial network structure is maintained with all loads energized. The three objectives considered are modeled with fuzzy sets to evaluate their imprecise nature and one can provide his or her anticipated value of each objective. A 69-node example is considered to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.