Tag: Clean Energy

IIT Kharagpur Signs MoU with Uneverse Mobilty, a Kolkata based Startup, for the Development & Commercialization of Sodium Ion Batteries in India

These Cost-Effective Batteries Will Boost the Rapid Growth Envisaged For E-Vehicles

Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Uneverse Mobility Pvt Ltd, a Kolkata based startup focusing on next generation battery technology and e-mobility segments for commercialization and further development of the Sodium Ion technology.

A team headed by Prof Amreesh Chandra from the Department of Physics at IIT Kharagpur have been working extensively on the development of Sodium-ion based energy solutions. They were amongst the first group of researchers in India who were funded by the Department of Science and Technology under their flagship scheme “Materials for Energy Storage”. The team has the capabilities to develop energy storage solutions starting from materials development, device level integration, recycling to determination of carbon footprint of the complete process.

Advantages of using this technology:

  • The Sodium-ion batteries will be 30 to 40% less expensive compared to lithium-ion technology
  • There will be a 100% indigenous supply chain where import of raw materials will not be required
  • There will be low carbon footprint
  • These products will not be dependent on mining of raw materials for electrodes
  • There will be near zero risk of accidental fires, unlike Lithium. The technology developed already has a Technology Readiness Level (TRL) of 7 thereby paving the way for industrialization.

“In comparison to Lithium-ion batteries, the sodium-ion batteries will be upto 40% cheaper, much safer and have lower carbon footprint. Sodium-ion batteries address the concerns of geopolitical and supply-chain issues, which are associated with Lithium-ion batteries. The materials, which will be used in such Sodium-ion batteries, have been fabricated inhouse. Hence, the batteries would be a live example of ‘Make in India’ and ‘Make for India’. Many of the Ministries of the Government of India have already started discussions and feasibility studies on the possibility of Sodium-ion based energy storage landscape and the future thus looks promising and exciting”, said Prof. Amreesh Chandra, Department of Physics, IIT Kharagpur.

Uneverse Mobility will be initially setting up MW scale facilities that would lead to commercialization using the home-grown technology, which already has a technology readiness level (TRL) of 7. Uneverse eventually plans set up GWh scale facilities to cater to both domestic and export markets. India is expected to need 220 Gwh of ACC battery by 2030. Current Indigenous ACC production planning & deployment is nowhere close to this requirement and therefore presents huge market opportunity for companies like Uneverse. This joint activity is a perfect example of the changing times in India, where the academia-industry collaboration is becoming the focus of research activities in most of the institutes of national importance.

“India’s current EV sector is characterized by dependency on subsidies, import dependent supply chain & lack of a core indigenous battery technology. For electric mobility to be truly a champion of sustainability, we need the building blocks to be also sustainable. Uneverse is a passionate attempt to create such indigenous building blocks for a sustainable future of e-mobility and clean energy. Uneverse, thus starts its journey by addressing the core of clean energy and e-mobility, that is, Battery Technology. To achieve this grand purpose, we have entered an exclusive MoU with IIT Kharagpur where indigenously developed sodium ion technology, which will have a portfolio of multiple form factors of cells, will be made available for Indian market. The developed technology will find application in not only electric vehicles but also in Drones, Consumer Electronics and Energy Storage. Globally, only a handful of companies have made progress in this technology. Therefore, we are quite upbeat about putting India at the forefront of this game changing battery technology”, said Mr Manohar Bethapudi, Founder & CEO, Uneverse Mobility Pvt. Ltd.

“We would be launching the first set of products manufactured out of West Bengal in the next quarter of the current fiscal. We are looking at a pan India market for our product range and are currently in talks with various channel partners for marketing and product distribution”, said Ms Kamalika Guha, Co – Founder and CMO, Uneverse Mobility Pvt Ltd.

Media coverage :

Telegraph

Statesman

ETV Bharat

Aaj Kal

Ei Samay

E-Vehicle

Times of India

 

     

         Statesman                                               Ei Samay                                                       Aaj Kal 

Inputs by: Prof. Amreesh Chandra, Department of Physics, IIT Kharagpur
Email : amreesh.chandra@gmail.com

By : Poulami Mondal, Digital & Creative Media Executive (Creative Writer)
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GYTI Award for IIT Kharagpur’s Clean Energy Research

Graphics: Suman Sutradhar

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Researchers from IIT Kharagpur have been conferred the Gandhian Young Technological Innovation Awards 2020 have been awarded for their work in the area of energy efficiency. Prof. Suman Chakraborty, Prof. Partha Saha and Dr. Aditya  Bandopadhyay, from the Department of Mechanical Engineering, have been awarded for their work “Electrical Power Generation from Wet Textile”. While Prof. Sunando Dasgupta and his team from the Department of Chemical Engineering, have been awarded for their work “Smart, Flexible, and Multi-Functional Thermal and Energy Management Systems for Next-Generation Electronic Devices.”

Congratulating the researchers, Director, Prof. Virendra Tewari said, “We still have sectors which need sourcing and efficient management of clean energy to meet our augmented power requirements be they in the remote areas or our automated way of life in the near future. It is essential that our researchers venture into avenues of generating clean energy in an unexampled way of sourcing and channelizing energy. The research works awarded have etched their mark in both frugal innovation and those expanding the technological edge in the area of energy management with direct community impact.”

The novelty of the first innovation, the nano-electricity generator, is in its frugal means instead of energy harvesting from complex resources.  The device has been tested in a remote village across a surface area of 3000 sq. m. Around 50 cloth items were put up for drying by washermen in the village. These clothes were connected to a commercial supercapacitor which discharged electricity of around 10 Volt in almost 24 hours. This stored energy is enough to glow a white LED for more than 1 hour.

“The clothes we wear are made from cellulose-based textile which has a network of nano-channels. Ions in saline water can move through this interlace fibrous nano-scale network by capillary action inducing an electric potential in the process,” explained the researchers.

The economy of scale can be achieved by drying a set of regular wearable garments under the sun-light. This eventually culminates into a utilitarian paradigm of low-cost power harvesting in extreme rural settings. This innovation has already been patented by them and published in “Nano Letters”, a high-impact journal in the field.

The group led by Prof. Sunando Dasgupta has been working with Purdue University, USA to address the problem of energy conservation and thermal management in wearable and flexible electronic devices. They are achieving this by leveraging the unique properties of smart materials infused with graphene.

“The material harvests the biomechanical energy of the user while storing the same and converting it into thermal energy towards the power management of the devices. The initial prototypes have shown significant promise and are undergoing intense long-term testing,” said Prof. Dasgupta.

The team is working towards consolidated thermal and energy management strategies for several existing systems, as well as electronic devices of the future, confirmed the researchers.

Contacts: 

Institute Related: Prof. B N Singh, registrar@hijli.iitkgp.ac.in; 

Media Outreach: Shreyoshi Ghosh, shreyoshi@adm.iitkgp.ac.in

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IIT KGP’s Clean Energy Dialogue

Business Standard       Devdiscourse     UNIIndia

PK Sinha Center for Bioenergy and Renewables at IIT Kharagpur has organized the DBT National Workshop on Bioenergy (DNWB 2019) in Kolkata on October 17-18, 2019. Funded by the Department of Biotechnology, Government of India, this workshop aims to bring together bioenergy scientists from around the country to promote a national conversation on and solve technological challenges towards achieving the national mission of deploying clean energy to fight climate change.

The workshop provides a rare opportunity to DBT’s five Bioenergy Centers, namely, the DBT-Pan IIT Center for Bioenergy, the DBT-ICGEB Center for Bioenergy, the DBT-IOCL Center, the DBT-TERI Center for Bioenergy, and the DBT-ICT Center for Energy Biosciences, to come together and discuss their bioenergy research, exchange new ideas, and collaborate towards building a renewable energy future for India.

“Climate change is the biggest threat to our species and our planet today. The reasons for climate change in the post-industrialization period are clearly anthropogenic, i.e., caused by human activity. In the last 168 years, the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have increased by 45%, from 285 ppm in 1850 to 415 ppm in 2018,” said Prof. Saikat Chakraborty, Convenor of the workshop.

This sudden increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration in the post-industrialization period has drastically enhanced the Greenhouse Effect, leading to global warming. The year 2017 was the hottest on record (followed by 2018) without an El Nino boost, with an average global temperature rise of 1°C higher since the pre-industrial level in 1850.

“As we are fast approaching the warning limit of 1.5°C of global warming, set by the Paris International Climate Agreement signed by 175 countries, the changes in global climate will be sweeping and devastating. Many small islands will be wiped out, deltas and coastal cities will be submerged,” remarked Prof. Chakraborty.

The glaciers in the Arctic, the Antarctic and the Himalayas are already melting at alarming rates, leading to a whirlwind of severe weather events: floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, severe snowstorms, scorching heatwaves, droughts and wildfires.

“Two hundred living species of plants and animals are going extinct from our planet every single day. In short, life on earth is in peril in a way it’s never been before,” he added.

Coordinated by Prof. Saikat Chakraborty and Prof. Mrinal K. Maiti of IIT Kharagpur, DNWB-2019 aims to bridge the gap between researchers from academia and industries with other professionals within India through various keynote addresses, scientific and technical lectures and poster presentations encompassing the current situation and future trends on various aspects of bioenergy, including combating climate change through biofuels, algal biofuels, lignocellulosic biofuels, and cyanobacterial biofuels. Professor M.S. Ananth, two-time Former Director of IIT Madras, will be the Chief Guest at the workshop’s inauguration program, and Dr. Anjan Ray, Director, Indian Institute of Petroleum Dehradun, will be the Guest of Honour, while Dr. Sangita M. Kasture, Joint Director, DBT, will be representing the Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India. The keynote addresses will be delivered by Dr. Anjan Ray, Director of IIP-Dehradun, Prof. Debabrata Das, Former MNRE Chair Professor at IIT Kharagpur, and Dr. Santanu Dasgupta, Senior Vice President at Reliance Industries Limited.

Currently headed by Prof. Makarand M. Ghangrekar, the PK Sinha Centre for Bioenergy and Renewables at IIT Kharagpur was incepted on August 31, 2009, by the hands of its founder and patron Dr. Prabhakant Sinha, an illustrious IIT Kharagpur alumnus. This Centre is India’s first Integrated Bioenergy Centre, which is involved in activities such as knowledge in action by partnering with the government, commercial organizations, knowledge dissemination through academia, industry and policymakers. Experts at the Centre are currently working in the areas of Bioethanol, Biodiesel, Biohydrogen, Biomethane, Algal biorefinery, Microbial fuel cells, Genetic engineering of energy crops, etc.

“We are also exploring various biological processes to innovate efficient, economically viable processes for the treatment of waste. Attempts have also been made to overcome the scale-up challenges of microbial fuel cells for the bioremediation of wastewater and electricity generation,” said the Centre’s Head, Prof. Ghangrekar.

Microwave for Clean Fuel

Times of India     Economic Times       Financial Express        Business Standard        India Today

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Kitchen to Cosmos Microwaves these days ring ‘n’ number of bells. IITKGP Researchers have tapped this microwave radiation to create Clean Energy from the nitrogen-rich non-food Sunn Hemp plants.

In the wake of the ongoing initiatives to control pollution, we are often made to think of the proverb ‘prevention is better than cure’. There is an urgency to replace the use of fossil fuels like petrol and diesel which are direct causes of pollution, global warming and climate change. Various clean energy technologies have been developed. Acres of land in the country have been allocated for solar and wind energy, hydel power and geothermal projects have been deployed and expanded over the decades. But India’s fossil fuel import bill still runs high due to non-availability of renewable energy sources at mass scale. Biofuels derived from high-energy non-edible plant sources such as Sunn Hemp on the other hand have the potential of making it available in large scale for replacement of fossil fuel which can find significant use in transportation sector. The main obstacle to its large scale deployment as a future fuel is its highly crystalline structure and long polymer chains, which make the fibres inaccessible to enzymatic and chemical treatments.

Researchers from IIT Kharagpur’s P K Sinha Center for Bioenergy have exacted the issue through the use of microwave radiation. The team from the Bioenergy Lab at the Dept. of Chemical Engineering has successfully converted non-edible lignocellulosic fibres of Sunn Hemp to biofuel precursors, and that too completing the entire conversion – which otherwise takes about 8-10 hours – in only 46 minutes using the microwave reactors in the lab.

“1 kilogram of Sunn hemp fibres containing 756 gram of cellulose produces 595 gram of glucose at 160°C, and 203 gram of hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF) at 180°C, in 46 minutes. The glucose is separated and fermented using yeasts to produce 230 g of ethanol-based biofuel which is often used in automobiles as a biofuel additive for gasoline. The platform chemical HMF can also be hydrogenated to furanic biofuels such as dimethylfuran which can be used as a replacement for diesel” explained researcher Souvik Kumar Paul.

Sunn hemp is widely grown in the subtropics of Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Pakistan, Russia, Sri Lanka, USA, Uganda. It is grown in almost all states of India, especially Bihar, Orissa, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal.

The large scale availability of Sunn Hemp in India along with its fast rate of growth and high cellulose (75.6%) and high energy contents (2.5×109 MJ/year) are the key elements of listing it as a top choice for the biofuel industry. Sunn hemp fibres produce 2268 kg dry biomass/acre in only 9–12 weeks, with 19 megajoule of energy/kg dry biomass at a global production of 130,000 MT/year.

“Sunn hemp fibre has the unique potential of being converted to transportation biofuels rather than being merely used as bast fibre for weaving mats, etc. Our research will give its chemical composition the necessary stability for conversion and deployment as liquid biofuels, which can be used by the transportation industry in a large scale,” said Prof. Saikat Chakraborty, lead researcher and faculty at the Dept. of Chemical Engineering and P K Sinha Center for Bioenergy.

These chemical reactions are performed by the scientists at IIT Kharagpur in a large microwave digestion system that houses 16 high pressure reactors. By combining the dried Sunn hemp fibres with chemicals such as ionic liquid and metal catalysts, and water at high temperatures, they form large molecular structures in these microwave reactors. This supramolecular complex being polar in nature rotates under the microwave’s alternating polarity and rapidly dissipates the electromagnetic energy through molecular collisions across the reactors. These dipole rotations and intermolecular collisions help rapidly break the polymeric bonds in the Sunn hemp fibres and convert them to biofuel precursors in only 46 minutes.

“Biofuel production costs are minimized by recovering and recycling the ionic liquid,” added Chakraborty. “This conversion process, which can be used for a large spectrum of non-food lignocelluloses apart from Sunn hemp, is particularly suitable for commercialization because it results in a 10-fold decrease in the reaction time. A mixture of biomass can also be processed in these reactors rather than a single biomass without any further increase in the reaction time, which should make this process an attractive option for the biofuel industry.”

While the significant industry potential of this invention has led the scientists to file for a patent, their findings have also appeared in the globally renowned journal Bioresource Technology published by Elsevier.