Tag: Gandhian Young Technological Innovation Award

IIT KGP Researchers Design Award-winning for Cardiovascular Device Testing Technology

Researchers from IIT Kharagpur have designed an automated smart device for online testing of cardiac medical devices and prosthetics. The device is capable of creating life-like simulations in cardiac failure cases due to various diseases and tests the performance of implantable devices and prosthetics such as Ventricular assist devices.

The World Health Organization reported 17.9 million deaths in 2016 from cardiovascular diseases (CVD) accounting for about 31% of global deaths. In India, over 28% of the deaths are due to CVD in 2016 according to a study published in 2018. According to the business intelligence company Fior Markets, the global cardiovascular devices market is expected to grow from USD 42.61 billion in 2019 to USD 71.05 billion by 2027, at a CAGR of 6.6% during the forecast period 2020-2027. These devices would include surgical devices as well as diagnostic and monitoring devices covering a large range of CVDs – Cerebrovascular Heart Disease, Stroke, Sudden Cardiac Arrest and Coronary Heart Disease. With rapid development in medical devices, especially for the implants, rigorous testing and assessment are essential during the developmental stage. 

“The intriguing complexity of physiology and function of the heart makes it difficult to carry out an in-depth study of the live organ. For researchers, the study of a cadaver heart does not provide many clues regarding its functioning in live conditions. This limitation led us to design a novel heart analogue model, Cardiovascular Replicator (CVR), which can serve as a platform for studying the cardiovascular system,” said lead researcher Prof. Prasanta Kumar Das from the Dept. of Mechanical Engineering. 

The Cardiovascular Replicator (CVR) developed by the team is an electromechanical system that can mimic the entire hemodynamics of the human heart along with its pulmonic and systemic circulations.

“The device enables us to simulate a long-range of heart diseases and conditions like aortic valve stenosis, ventricular septal defects, fetal circulation, cross circulation, single ventricle conditions and Fontan correction etc. along with hardware in the loop simulation. We can also run tests prior to animal trials,” said researcher Sumanta Laha.

The design is equipped with sensors and a widescreen display which facilitates online real-time data monitoring and logging. This system is made in a modular way to ease transportation and enable improvisation.  

Prof. Indranil Ghosh from the Cryogenic Engineering Centre pointed out the pedagogical advantage of the device for the medical community.

“Cardiovascular Replicator will not only be of great value for researchers working in medical technology innovation but also for medical students during their practical training due to the experiential learning from real-life simulations of the diseases,” he said.

The research has been awarded the prestigious SITARE – Gandhian Young Technological Innovation Award 2020 for this work titled ‘Automated Cardiovascular Replicator for Online Assessment of Cardiac Assist Devices, Prosthetics and Beyond’.

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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