Area of Research

The Department of Civil Engineering is blessed with highly qualified and experienced faculty members who are actively involved in outcome based education and research outreach. Though, these are often narrowed by the limitations in acquiring the funding and establishing the latest laboratory facilities. The department aims to boost the visibility by increase in the number of research publications in reputed indexed international journals and by producing patents.

Many of the faculties have already been serving as reviewers of prestigious international and national SCI/ Scopus indexed journals by publishers such as Elsevier, Wiley Inter Science, ASCE, Springer and the faculty aims to increase their visibility in the research community. The Department aims to enhance the collaborative research with foreign universities and industries by entering into MoUs with many prestigious abroad universities and institutes and organizations of national reputation.

Our research community addresses a variety of exciting problems, different from what has been done before and offers counter-intuitive insights that will challenge established viewpoints. Not only does our research make significant advancements to existing body of knowledge but also enriches the classroom experience. Faculty members undertake research on a wide range of topics. The general work areas of the faculty in the Department can be broadly summarized as:

• Structural Engineering : Earth Quake Resistant Design,Structural Health Monitoring, Low cost building, Pre Engineered Building, Composite Structures.
• Building Materials : Chemical Attack in Concrete, Special Concrete, Non-destructive Evaluation of Concrete, Concrete Deterioration, Supplementary Cementing Materials, Durability of Concrete, Cement Chemistry, Alkali Activated Materials, Characterization of Construction Materials, Sustainable Building Materials, Use of industrial wastes in construction, Development of cementitious binders with low carbon footprint, Use of scarp tyre pads for base isolation, Use of mud concrete for RCC applications.
• Construction Management : Construction Labour Productivity, Risk Management in Construction Projects, Performance of PPP Projects, Sustainable construction materials.
• Transportation Engineering : Traffic Flow Theory, Transportation Planning and Management, Vehicle Simulation Models, Microscopic and Macroscopic Analysis of traffic, Intersection Control and Design, Traffic Data Management, Transportation Planning, Traffic Safety, Transport Policy, Simulation and Optimization, Travel Behaviour Analysis, Route Choice Modelling.
• Water Resource Engineering : Optimization of Hydrosystems Using Stochastic Search Algorithms, Predictive Modeling in Hydrology and Hydraulics Using Data Driven Techniques, Stochastic Hydrology,Risk and Uncertainty Analysis of Hydrosystems, Use of Wavelet Transforms and Hilbert Huang Transform for Spectral Analysis of Hydro-meteorological Datasets, Hydroclimatology.
• Geotechnical Engineering : Ground Improvement Technique, Environmental-Geo technology, Slope stability analysis
• Environmental Engineering : Environmental Forensics, Environmental Law, stuarine hydrodynamics, Estuarine sediment dynamics, trace metal partitioning, contaminant transport through porous media, water and wastewater treatment, Industrial wastewater treatment, Advanced oxidation processes.

Centre for Water Resources and Environmental Management (CWREM) is the research centre functioning in the Department of Civil Engineering since 2016 to undertake research and consultancy in the water and environmental engineering field. The centre is actively involved in the research works and started involving in major consultancy works with LSGD Kerala and Kerala Water Authority. Also, the Civil Engineering department entered into a MoU with Kerala Water Authority (KWA) in the last year and the discussions on undertaking consultancy works are in progress. In the computational research field, the faculty attached with the centre could publish in many SCI indexed journals in the last year by involving in research collaborations with faculty of prestigious international universities. Our institute and Department of Civil Engineering have entered into a MoU with Near East University (NEU) Cyprus and University of Tabriz, Iran in the last year. Currently Four Ph.D. scholars are working under the faculty attached with the centre.

Along with the 6th edition of ICMSC in December 2022, the Department of Civil Engineering took a lead role in establishing a “Centre for Sustainable Practices” which is in fact a dream come true moment for us. The Centre is intended to develop and disseminate sustainable technology and to encourage interdisciplinary research in this domain. The primary objectives of the centre are to take up multi-disciplinary research in sustainable technology, to apply the research outcomes in the development of prototypes and real life structures, and to disseminate sustainable technology to different strata of stakeholders through training programmes.