FOCUS: IIT-KHARAGPUR

Enabling industrial progress

IIT-Kharagpur has an enviable record in the field of technological research and development.

SUHRID SANKAR CHATTOPADHYAY
in Kharagpur

INDIAN Institute of Technology-Kharagpur has contributed significantly to the technological growth of the country through research in diverse fields of engineering and science and has earned international recognition for its quality products. Even though it is best known as an academic institution, it has always placed as much importance on research and development activities as it has on teaching.

Companies such as Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL), Tata Iron and Steel Company (TISCO), MECON, Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL), the Indian Oil Corporation (IOC), Balmer Lawrie, Tata Tea, Tata Consultancy Services and the Indian Railways and organisations in the Defence sector have joined hands with the institute to carry out Technology Development Missions initiated by the Planning Commission of India and various other challenging development programmes.

Cryomachining is one such technology. It is close to moving to factories from the IIT's laboratories. This technology, which researchers at the Institute's Department of Mechanical Engineering have been working on, involves the use of liquid nitrogen in industrial metal cutting as a coolant, avoiding the generation of toxic coolant waste. The application of oil and oil-water mixtures to lubricate and cool down cutting tools when machining metals is a messy procedure which also has harmful side-effects. Researchers in the past have tried and failed, to use liquid nitrogen as a coolant. IIT-Kharagpur has found a way to do this 'cryomachining'. This process does not leave behind any polluted residue, as liquid nitrogen evaporates. One can also machine very hard metals and alloys at higher speeds.

PARTH SANYAL
The old block of the Indian Institute of Technology-Kharagpur.

Computer-aided design (CAD) of very large scale integrated (VLSI) circuit chips is another major area of research at IIT-Kharagpur. The single most important item found in modern gadgets such as washing machines, WAP-enabled mobile phones, tiny hand-held calculators and the latest cars with global positioning systems is a chip. In fact, theVLSI Circuit inside a chip is universally recognised as a prime driver of information technology. CAD tools are essential for the physical design of layouts and the physical and behavioural verification of the results. The CAD group at the Advanced VLSI Laboratory in the IIT has been using artificial intelligence to develop CAD tools, much faster than any currently known method. Many reputed international design houses use CAD databases developed by this research group.

IIT-Kharagpur's VLSI design laboratory is among the few academic laboratories in the world that have the total support of a fabrication laboratory. This service is provided by the National Semiconductor Corporation of the United States. This allows the team at IIT-Kharagpur to work at 0.18-and 0.25-micron-deep levels of CMOS technology. The institute has become the first Indian education centre to take up research and consultancy projects in such deep-sub-micron VLSI design with leading international agencies. It has also been able to attract enormous industry funding for related software research in design and verification tool development.

Meanwhile, researchers at the Microelectronics Centre under the Department of Electronics Engineering have been making spectacular progress in developing microelectronics and microsystems technologies. The knowledge of the properties of materials that the designers gained by fabricating various devices has enabled them to take up the challenge of designing VLSI chips. The microelectronics group was the first academic group in the country to fabricate integrated circuits. It had fabricated the first telecard chip for card-operated pay phones in India.

IIT-Kharagpur has also helped make the Indian Railways safer by devising a non-contact method of assessing the status of the overhead electric wires used by electric trains. The Institute is also developing a comprehensive management information system - CoalNet - for Coal India Ltd, which, when implemented, will enable CIL and its subsidiaries to face global competition.

For the benefit of qualified doctors, the institute has started a post-graduate course in medical science and technology. The rationale behind this is that medicine is changing rapidly with the application of modern technology in imaging and diagnosis. It has been seen that with the advancement of imaging techniques, doctors have become more dependent on technicians in using them and in many cases even in interpreting the results.

A research team in the Computer Science and Engineering Department has developed a software system for visually handicapped persons, known as the Bharati Braille Transcription System, which transliterates Indian language texts in Braille and vice-versa. The cost of this system is one-fifth of the existing imported system, which uses only English. The Bharati Braille System can operate in Hindi, Bengali, Assamese, Oriya, Telugu, Marathi and English and can also deal with mixed documents, which have English words or sentences in a predominantly Indian language text.

The Institute has also made important contributions in the field of microzonation, using which the safety corridor for a seismic hazard can be ascertained. It involves the mapping of seismic hazards, in relative or absolute terms, on an urban block-by-block scale. A geological research team in the institute acts as a nodal agency in the all-India microzonation project.

The Institute has also set up a Laser Processing Laboratory to develop industrial application for lasers. The laser processing team at the Mechanical Engineering Department at present works on the commercial applications of this versatile tool.

Apart from these projects, the IIT has contributed a lot in terms of research in other fields, such as nano-particles, porous ceramics and metal casting, and in terms of innumerable projects sponsored by the Indian Space Research Organisation, the Defence Research and Development Organisation and other governmental agencies. The Institute also contributes to basic science through the research and published works of its faculty.

The Institute, since its inception, has studies the various problems of rural areas and has taken important steps for their development through the use of technology and participatory planning and management of resources. Through its Rural Development Centre, set up in 1975, IIT-Kharagpur has carried out successful projects in wasteland reclamation and participatory forest management. Not only has the institute educated the local rural people on how to harvest useful produce for handicrafts and medicines from the forests without damaging the plants, but introduced to them the concept of marketing.