Imagine that you can wrap your mobile phone around your wrist or rollout a screen from it so that you can watch full colour television, a movie, read a book or a newspaper. Imagine a portable rolled out television that can be sticked on the window like a wallpaper or a solar cell panel that you can carry in a foldable format during your next hiking on the Himalayas. Even more, you can have a tattoo applied on any part of your body that can continuously measure your blood pressure, heart rate, glucose level, perform ECG or deliver the drug as an when required.

Electronic waste comprising of predominantly consumer electronic goods is increasing at an alarming rate since the past decade. Treating this electronic waste to recover as many valuables as possible is one way to tackle this menace without changing any of the materials or manufacturing processes. An alternative however is to develop technologies that will utilise only environmentally friendly and sustainable materials for the next generation of consumer electronic devices.

The lithium-ion battery is a widely used energy storage technology because of its high volumetric and gravimetric energy density. These batteries are used in portable electronics, electric vehicles and even at power stations to provide uninterrupted power supply. These batteries have tiny memory effect, low self-discharge and can be retrieved from deep discharge. In addition, most of the used components are recyclable.A battery is composed of mainly three components: cathode, anode and electrolyte.

Lithium-ion batteries powers the operation of almost all electronic gadgets are known for their energy density. They are in constant need to power all electronic devices at various operating conditions. The most important limitation of these commercial lithium-ion batteries is their operating temperature range. They cannot be operated at extreme temperatures (not less than 10 o C and not higher than 60 o C).In such cases, constant research was on electrolyte formulations which can stay as a liquid at sub-zero temperatures.

Corrosion affects productivity, safety, reliability and hence global competitiveness of all industries. Importantly, they affect the environment and devour the finite natural resources that are available to mankind and so cause irrecoverable damage to a nation. As new technologies evolve, tolerance to corrosion becomes stringent, requiring advanced research in this area. The following expertise is developed to address this concern.

Corrosion is one of the primary issues of concern for the industrial sector. A rough estimate shows that there is a loss of about Rs50,000 crores per annum in India alone due to corrosion. Zinc and chromium used widely today to impede corrosion suffer from cost or environmental issues. Graphene, also known as a wonder material, can help overcome these problems due to its impermeable and inert characteristics.A large scale graphene production route has been devised which can produce defect-free few-layer graphene with a yield of 18% from the starting material graphite.

Powders, or granular materials more generally, are widely handled and processed in different industries (e.g., pharmaceutical, chemical, ceramic, steel, food and agriculture). The flow of granular materials is quite different from fluids and in the case of mixtures, the particles have a tendency to spontaneously separate out (segregate). We have been working on developing an understanding the rheology and mixing/segregation of granular materials using experiments, continuum models and particle level simulations.

Continuous flow process provides a potential alternative to batch synthesis because of its inherent advantages such as efficient heat exchange, high batch to batch reproducibility, fast mixing, high throughput, safety and the ability to do multi-step telescoping synthesis. Due to these advantages, these processes have been referred to as the most promising ‘Green Technology’.

Magnetic alloys consisting of transition elements, especially the ones known as Heusler alloys are in the limelight because of the multifunctional properties they exhibit. These include ferromagnetic shape memory effect, giant magnetocaloric effect (MCE), giant exchange bias (EB), large anomalous Hall effect and half metallic ferromagnetism (HMF).

Haul roads being the life lines of mines are an important factor for smooth and continuous working of mine. Traditional ways of building haul roads lead to frequent ruptures and breakdown in these roads due to erosion of material, water slurry formation, huge dust generation, etc. This leads to production halts and productivity decline and ultimately economic losses.

In addition to the more conventional applications, such as refractory linings of steel-making furnaces / ladles and pressurised chemical vessels,engineering ceramics, owing to their high stiffness, excellent thermal stability, relatively low density and corrosion resistance have a variety of applications as advanced structural materials in cutting tools, armor, wear resistant parts, etc.

A remotely operated ground vehicle (RoVeR) was designed and developed for use in counter terrorism and counter-insurgency operations by the Indian Army.The RoVeR can traverse difficult terrain, extreme slopes, inspect suspicious objects (e.g. improvised explosive devices) with a robotic arm (even when hidden under a bridge) and give visual feedback to an operator away at a safe distance of 0.5 km.

Features 

Understanding impact dynamics of bouncing and non-bouncing droplets on hydrophobic and superhydrophobic surfaces is useful in several technical applications. These surfaces exhibit low wettability and this property may be leveraged in the applications such as pesticide spray coating, drag reduction, anti-snow adhesion surfaces, self cleaning surfaces, and surface cooling via spray evaporative cooling and on spatially varying wettability surfaces.The effect of pitch of the pillars and impact velocity are studied for the impact dynamics of a microliter

On a fine morning, if you take a tiny droplet of coffee and dry it on a table top, a ring like pattern of dried coffee particles forms. This problem is known as coffee ring problem and the mechanism of the ring formation was firstproposed by Deegan et al, 1997. This seems to be an efficient way pattern micro or nanoparticles on solid surfaces. For example, in bioassays and ink-jet printing. In our lab, we have established new ways to self-assemble particles by evaporating sessile droplets.

Due to growing push towards miniaturisation, microscale manufacturing is gaining prominence in biomedical, diagnostic, strategic and electronics applications.

India is planning to implement BS (Bharat Stage) VI emission norms by the year 2020. With this, advanced technologies are necessary to reduce emissions in IC engines by a large percentage. Several technologies have been tried to reduce emissions in our lab; some of them are:
Ultra-cooled EGR (UCEGR)
Exhaust gas is cooled, using a counter flow heat exchanger, to less than 5 o C and recirculated back to the engine.
Oxidised EGR (OEGR)

Lifted flame is a very complicated turbulence flame; difficult to model thelift-off height. Conditional moment closure (CMC) is an advanced combustion model but it too cannot predict the lift-off height accurately. We have successfully proposed a new model based on extinction criteria (CMCE). CMCE has predicted lift-off heights accurately for a wide range of jet velocities and coflow temperatures in a lesser CPU time. This proposed model helps in modeling gas turbine combustion accurately.

This is the age of smart coatings – which means the coating will act its designated function as per the pre-defined stimulus. Multi-storey glass buildings, ACP facades, solar panels, sophisticated furniture, etc. all gather dust or stains which spoil them. In order to make them stain / dust free, it is advisable to provide the self-cleaning ability.