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.

A novel route to achieve 2D carrier confinement in a wedge shaped wall structure made of a polar semiconductor has been demonstrated. Our theory reveals that the wedge shape leads to the development of charges of equal polarity on the two inclined facades of the wall. Polarisation induced negative (positive) charges on the facades can push the electrons (holes) inward for a n-type (p-type) material which results in the formation of a 2D electron (hole) gas at the central plane and ionised donors (acceptors) at the outer edges of the wall.

Modern gun-battles are rarely waged on open ground where enemies face each other, and the origin of unfriendly and friendly fire are easy to locate. Instead, most combats are now staged in obstacle-dense situations like cities, forests and mountain valleys, where the location of a shooter may be difficult to pinpoint aurally due to reverberations. More importantly, our security forces may not even be present within audible range of all gunshots at all times, due to the highly mobile nature of modern combat.

Composites have been extensively used in the manufacturing of wind turbine blades over the past two decades. Significant expertise and field experience has been accumulated in the design, manufacturing and repair / maintenance of these wind turbine blades. However, with the increasing blade length, the design imperatives have pushed the materials used for the blade construction from conventional E-glass to carbon fiber based polymer composites. This shift also leads to design shift from stiffness limited design to strength limited design.

Particle image velocimetry (PIV) technique is used for measurement of fluid velocity. It involves seeding micron-size particles in a flow, illuminating the particles with a laser pulse, capturing the position of the particles using a camera, and finally interrogating two such time elapsed images to obtain the displacement (and velocity) of the particle (or flow). The technique provides information at numerous points simultaneously and is non-intrusive; these advantages make PIV score substantially higher than conventional techniques (such as Pitot tube).

In current scenario, environmental pollution has become a greater challenge for the whole mankind. Main source of the pollutant includes industrial applications, air and land based traffic. These emissions are mainly CO, NO x and UHC (unburned hydro carbon) causing many harmful effects like acid rain, smog and haze resulting in global warming. It is expected that emissions norms will become stricter in near future. It is reported that by 2025, NO x , CO and UHC should be reduced by 80%.