Best B.Tech Projects - 2012

As a part of the B.Tech curriculum, the students of IIT Patna are required to do a research oriented B.Tech project in their final year. The aim of this project is to impart to students a flavour of design, innovation and research. Among all the projects submitted, the students are judged for the best project in their discipline. The abstract of the best B.Tech projects for the year 2012 in each of the three engineering disciplines of IIT Patna are as follows:

Computer Science and Engineering: Competitive Analysis of Cooperative Caching Algorithms

Student: Mr. Mohit Ahuja

One of the key implementations of online algorithms is caching/paging, concerned with the eviction choice of a virtual memory page for replacement, when another page is requested by the processor, to create a space no more available in fast memory or cache. However, caching, in general, is discussed with reference to a single machine. Due to ever broadening gap between processor performance and disk performance and the emergence of high speed, low latency networks, transferring file chunks over a network increased in speed by few notches in recent times. Hence, it seems a good idea to implement the basic principles of caching in a distributed environment, for which cooperative caching comes out as a viable choice. In cooperative caching, a scalable aggregate cache is formed for a centralized server (or servers) using some memory from each client. This prevents the creation of hotspots at the file server and distributes the network load.

The prime objective of this project was to analyze the cooperative algorithms for caching using competitive analysis and to come up with tight performance bounds on the Cooperative Least Recently Used (CLRU) and ROBINHOOD algorithms. We also came up with a scalable, centralized and randomized algorithm RANDCLRU which is a randomized version of CLRU. With our analysis we found tight lower and upper bounds on the performance of RANDCLRU.

Electrical Engineering: ARM based implementation of Text-To-Speech (TTS) for real time Embedded Systems

Student: Mr.  Shaik Abdul Rawoof

Since decade, real time hardware implementation of Text-To-Speech system has been drawing attention of the research community due to its various real time applications. These include reading aids for the blind, talking aid for the vocally handicapped and other commercial applications. All these applications demand the real time embedded platform to meet the real time specifications such as speed, power, space requirements. In this context the embedded processor ARM(Advanced RISC Machine) has been chosen as embedded hardware platform to implement Text-To-Speech (TTS) conversion. This conversion needs algorithms to perform various operations like parts of speech tagging, phrase marking, word to phoneme conversion and clustergen synthesis. These algorithms are coded and developed in C using eclipse IDE and finally implemented on commercially available ARM9 microcontroller (AT91SAM9263EJ-S).  Experiments have been performed on ARM microcontroller using test cases i.e. texts, and corresponding speech has been observed using audio amplifier. This real time implementation of TTS can be used as an integral part of the aforesaid real time embedded systems. 

Mechanical Engineering:

Two projects from Mechanical Engineering were selected for the best project award.

Flying on flapping wings

Student: Mr. Ankit Bharadwaj

Ornithopter is an aircraft that flies by flapping its wing. The main objective of this project is to design an ornithopter by imitating the flapping wing flight of large wing span birds. First phase of this project deals with simulation of flapping wing aerodynamics. Aerodynamics of flapping wing can be modeled within the framework of unsteady Navier-Stokes equation. Non-linear physics with multiple variables and time varying geometries pose great challenges for modeling. A 2D model of flapping wing in a static fluid medium has been simulated in CFX module of ANSYS workbench. The flapping wing mechanism is designed and fabricated. This has been used to experimentally determine the lift generated by flapping wing mechanism. Finally, a comparison was made between simulation and experimental results.

Figure-1: Schematic diagram of flapping wing mechanism

Figure-2: Flapping wing mechanism

Design and Characterization of Einstein Szilard Refrigerator

Student: Mr. Surabathuni Pallav

About 72 years ago, the famous physicist Albert Einstein and his former student LeoSzilard filed for a patent on a vapour absorption refrigeration cycle which used Ammonia, Water and Butane as working fluids and operated without any moving parts and requiring only a heat source. The cycle could not be commercially adopted due to the emergence of Freon which was overwhelmingly economical at that time. But the Einstein – Szilard refrigerator has renewed importance today due to energy and environmental concerns.

In this work, the original patent and a doctoral thesis from Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, were reviewed. This was followed by designing a prototype to test the feasibility of thermodynamic cycle proposed by Einstein and Szilard. Flexible design concepts are implemented to accommodate future modification and replacement of each component. The experiments on the designed, fabricated and assembled setup (Figure-3) with ammonia, water and pentane as working fluids confirmed the feasibility of Einstein-Szilard Refrigerator. The performance of the most critical component, bubble pump (Figure-4), was satisfactory. A video of this can be found at this link (Steady Bubble Pump).

Figure-3: Test setup of Einstein-Szilard Refrigerator

Figure-4: Only heat is sufficient to pump the fluid without the need of any moving part