Chennai: Researchers from IIT Kharagpur have bagged the ‘Gandhian Young Technological Innovation Award 2020’ for developing a mechanism for generating electricity from wet clothes left under sunlight to dry.
Another team from the institute was separately granted the same award for addressing the problem of energy conservation and thermal management in wearable and flexible electronic devices.
In a statement, IIT Kharagpur Director Prof Virendra Tewari said, ‘We still have sectors which need sourcing and efficient management of clean energy to meet our augmented power requirements, even in the remote areas.’
The ‘Gandhian Young Technological Innovation (GYTI) Awards’ was instituted by the Society for Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Institution (SRISTI), a voluntary organization.
According to SRISTI, GYTI Award celebrates the spirit of student innovation in all the fields of engineering, science, technology and design through extremely affordable/frugal solution or the ones pushing the technological edge.
An IIT spokesperson said that 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’.
Prof Sunando Dasgupta and his team from the Department of Chemical Engineering have also been awarded for their work – ‘Smart, flexible, and multi-functional thermal and energy management systems for next-generation electronic devices’.