The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : These students are flying high

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Nov 28, 2007
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Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

These students are flying high

Chitra V. Ramani

After all, how many can boast of designing a hovercraft?

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Winners: The group of engineering students from M.S. Ramaiah Institute of Technology along with their hovercraft in Bangalore.

Bangalore: They are not like boys their age. For one, Sudipto Aich, Parimal Vijay S.S., Uday R., Vikram Aditya Kumar and Amarendra Kumar, engineering students from M.S. Ramaiah Institute of Technology, have designed a hovercraft.

“Anyone can design a car or something. We wanted to do try our hand at building something unique. While browsing the Internet one day, we came upon the hovercraft race competition, organised as part of the annual Indian Institute of Technology, Madras tech fest, Shaastra 2007. We enrolled ourselves as Team Spectrum and got to work,” said Sudipto.

Challenge

Parimal said that the five wanted to do something practical. “Our curriculum, syllabus or whatever one may call it restricts that. After we got to know about the competition, there was no stopping us. Building a hovercraft from scratch was challenging and a lot of fun,” he said.

The team had just about six weeks to build, design, test and race a remote-controlled hovercraft. “We concentrated on designing a model that would go fast, using little power. Also, we were working on a shoestring budget. The material that we used was also very basic. We actually sawed the wood into shape ourselves, sitting on the terrace,” said Sudipto.

Materials

He also said that the other materials that they used included cycle tubes, ribbons and epoxy.

“We actually removed a two-channel AM radio from our friend’s car and used it to build the hovercraft. The USP of our hovercraft is that it hovers at a very low height, which gives it a low centre of gravity that actually helped us make it go fast.” Parimal said that as many as 330 teams had registered for the competition, but only 125 teams turned up with working models.

“When we actually reached Chennai, where the competition was held, we found that almost all teams had models that used two power sources. Also, ours was the only model with two fixed rudders. However, we came in fifth in the competition,” he said.

Trial and error

Sudipto said that they built the hovercraft mainly by trial and error. “It was a great feeling to actually go to Chennai and compete with teams from renowned colleges across the country. We scored over the IIT teams also. Our college, taking note of our achievement, has promised to reimburse the money we spent on building the hovercraft,” he added.

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