Tag: electric

IDBI Trusteeship CSR Funding for IIT KGP’s Electric Vehicle

IIT Kharagpur gets CSR Funding from IDBI Trusteeship for Developing Light-Weight Parts for Indigenous Three-Wheeler Electric Vehicles

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IDBI Trusteeship Services Ltd. has given a fillip to IIT Kharagpur’s Deshla electric vehicle project through its Corporate Social Responsibility programme. This funding will be used towards the design and development of aerodynamic body panels and light-weight structures for next-generation electric three-wheelers.

Electric vehicles need to match internal combustion (petrol/diesel/CNG/LPG) engine counterparts in initial cost, performance, reliability, etc. and better them in lower running costs and ease of use if they are to replace conventional vehicles. Revolutionary design changes, such as a drastic reduction in vehicle weight, aerodynamic body panels and indigenous development of relevant technologies e.g. motors, battery management systems, motor controller, battery pack design, etc. are essential to this end.

“Using the CSR contribution of IDBI Trusteeship, our key focus would be on aerodynamic body panel design for three-wheeler vehicles with peak speeds around50 kmph vehicle. We will also experiment on new materials and chassis designs to develop lightweight structures. The combination of these should make the vehicle much more efficient and provide a higher range from the battery pack with better pick-up and peak speeds. We have outlined a two-year proposal for this of which we have received funding for the first phase” said Prof. Vikranth Racherla, project leader and faculty at the Dept. of Mechanical Engineering at IIT Kharagpur.

“We try to cover the geography of the country strategically for green projects to support India’s goals in reducing its carbon footprint among other CSR projects,” said Swapan Kumar Bagchi, MD & CEO, IDBI Trusteeship Services Ltd. who is also an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur. Bagchi had visited IIT Kharagpur in February 2020 to finalize the phase I funding for the project.

The project is expected to involve a large number of students from various departments of the Institute and also interns from other colleges working on various subsystems of electric vehicles. The innovations are expected to be ready in around two years. Participating students over a period of time would develop expertise in various subsystems of electric vehicles. These students are expected to lead electric vehicle development work in industries or become entrepreneurs in this segment once they graduate.

“The Deshla electric vehicle is one of the most successful and timely innovations from IIT Kharagpur, further it is totally based on indigenous technology. Last year the Govt. of India expanded the scope of CSR funding to IITs and other national institutions to promote industry-academia engagements in research and academics. The scope is immense and IIT Kharagpur is reaching out to several PSUs, MNCs and private corporations to support end-to-end research,” said Prof. Anandaroop Bhattacharya, Associate Dean, International Relations who is heading the CSR initiative at IIT Kharagpur.

The Institute through its R&D projects has reached out to large sections of population solving challenges related to malnutrition, health and sanitation, power generation, clean drinking water, environmental sustainability, education, rural development and livelihood, gender equality and women’s empowerment and even national heritage, arts and culture among the others. The Institute’s CSR oriented projects have been conferred national awards and honours as well.

Get Electric Power from Your Wet Clothes

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Indian scientists have the reputation of innovating unique solutions to global challenges befitting the key factors of affordability and resource availability. While the success of such innovations has made ISRO one of the most respected space agencies in the world, several such innovations by researchers in academia have brought in momentous changes in the lives of people in India.

In one such feat, researchers from IIT Kharagpur have ventured into the avenue of clean energy generation in an unexampled way of sourcing electricity from the drying of clothes in open space. Drying of clothes is a part and parcel of our lives and who could have thought that it can meet the power requirements through Nanoscale Energy Harvesting.

Traditionally woven cellulose-based fabric contains a tiny channel network which has been used by the group of researchers for electrical power generation. They successfully guided the movement of saline water amidst continuous evaporation quite analogous to water transport across the parts of a living plant. The device design inherently exploits a large transpiration surface for achieving a sustainable motion of salt ions, through natural evaporation phenomenon.

“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 lead researcher Professor Suman Chakraborty, a professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department, and a lead researcher of the group.

The device has been tested in a remote village across a surface area of 3000 sq. metre. 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 novelty of this innovation is in its frugal means instead of energy harvesting from complex resources emphasized Prof. Chakraborty. “It was beyond imagination that a wet cloth being dried in a natural atmosphere could be made capable of generating clean energy. This would be extremely beneficial in addressing the essential power requirements for the underprivileged community and in remote areas,” he opined.

Another novelty of this device is the use of intrinsic surface energy of the fabric for driving the current. In contrast other artificially engineered power generation devices need external pumping resources.

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,” explained Chakraborty.

India’s summer climate would serve as an enhancer to maximize the flow-induced electrical potential. However, any geographical region with a hot and dry climate would be effective for using this technology seamlessly.

The above research has been recently published in Nano Letters (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.nanolett.9b02783), a high-impact Journal from the American Chemical Society. The research team consisted of Ph.D student Sankha Suvra Das, MS student Vinay Manaswi Pedireddi and Assistant Professor Aditya Bandopadhyay, under the overall supervision of Professor Chakraborty. The research has been financially supported by the Institute Challenge Grants, a unique initiative from IIT Kharagpur.