January 15, 2011
Schools of Engineering, Amritapuri & Coimbatore
Amrita faculties from the Amritapuri and Coimbatore campuses have stayed busy through the holidays collaborating to replenish their departments with fresh perspectives and new information in the field of electrical and electronics engineering.
Last December each campus conducted a faculty development workshop addressing an important element in this field.
The Coimbatore campus’ workshop on Computing Technologies for Power Systems organized from December 13 to17, covered a variety of topics of the engineering world.
Dr. S. Balamurugan focused on the subject of Fuzzy Logic, a somewhat new discipline focusing on a system of characterizing and quantifying incertitude in engineering systems caused by insufficient knowledge, fuzziness, ambiguity and vagueness.
The Professor also covered PSCAD, an all-purpose time domain simulation tool used to examine transient actions of electrical networks.
Artificial neural networks are mathematical/computational models used to detect patterns in data and demonstrate complex relationships between inputs and outputs. Drs. R. Jayabarathi and S. Balamurugan together elaborated on this topic.
Exploratory problem-solving techniques that imitate the process of natural evolution often used to produce practical solutions to search problems and optimization, genetic algorithms was taught by Ms. K. R. M. Vijaya Chandrakala.
Dr. M. Arunkumar, Scientist, ABB, lectured on Support Vector Machines, a collection of associated supervised learning methods used in analyzing data and discovering patterns for classification and regression analysis. Mr. N. Janarthanan addressed ETAP electrical engineering software solutions.
As the workshop concluded, intrigued participants felt that their five days were spent well, and requested similar workshops with hands-on training for the future.
The Amritapuri campus similarly called on the expertise of highly experienced engineers in its short training program from December 21 to 23 focusing on Smart Grid: Application and Challenges.
A new type of electrical network which uses two-way digital communications to transfer electricity from suppliers to customers, a smart grid allows dynamic transfer of power that can help suppliers regulate appliances in customers’ residences helping them save money and energy and ultimately provide better service.
The workshop elaborated on the topics of smart energy metering, home energy management, distributed generators in smart grid, FACTS applications in Smart Grid, interfacing and control of renewable energy with smart grid, and energy storage technologies in distributed generation.
“Program attendees felt that they acquired valuable knowledge,” stated Dr. Smitha Krishnan, who coordinated the Amritapuri workshop.
As Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham continues to grow and expand, a focus on research illuminates the path ahead for India’s scientific community, attracting some of her finest scholars. Both workshops trained not only the Amrita faculty, but also several faculty from other institutions.
