Integration of engineering courses is on the rise to create new courses so that students can pick up skills in multiple streams and at the same time specialise in a new area. Instrumentation and Control Engineering (ICE) falls in this group. With the Instrumentation and Control Systems growing in importance due to their applicability in the emerging industries, this new course has been designed to create specialised engineers in this sector.
“Instrumentation and Control plays an important role in all the type of industries like electrical, electronic, mechanical, chemical, process and production and no industry can run its operations without control systems and instrumentation to monitor and maintain the performance, says Y. Rajeshwari, Head of the ICE Department at G. Narayanamma Institute of Technology and Science (GNITS), which is one of the very few colleges to offer the course.
“The ICE has gained a lot of importance because of the rapid growth as well as integration of software and computers in the field of test and measurement (T&M). There is no field, which is not using Instrumentation and Control System extensively. Consequently, it has become of paramount importance for the students of Instrumentation and Control Engineering to gain versatile and in-depth knowledge in this field, she says.
The students of ICE branch study 40 per cent of Electronics subjects, 15 per cent of Computer Science subjects and 40 per cent of advanced subjects on Instrumentation and Control Systems. The ICE branch students can also opt for M.Tech. or MS courses in India and abroad in many fields like DSP, S&S, VLSI, and Networking, Biomedical, Computer Science and Process control.
Dr. Rajeshwari says the ICE department at ICE has excellent infrastructure provided with state- of- art equipment and has advanced equipments like industrial process trainer, ARM processors, Analytical instruments like gas chromatography, UV-VIS spectrophotometer, biomedical instrumentation like ECG and biotelemetry.
So far five batches of the students have passed out and are well placed in the multinational companies and industries like TCS, WIPRO, Satyam, Accenture, Infosys and few of them are working as Instrumentation engineers in HAL, Tata projects, Reliance Industries, Navayuga Power corporation etc.
