A student of Bannari Amman Institute of Technology in Sathyamangalam has bagged the Defence Research and Development Organisation’s (DRDO’s) innovation contest ‘Dare to Dream 2.0’ at the national level.
DRDO had launched the contest during the fifth death anniversary of former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam to promote individuals and start-ups for innovation in defence and aerospace technologies in the country after the call of Atmanirbhar Bharat given by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Pravin of Bioprocess and Bioproducts Special Laboratory of the college submitted the project “Flame retardant Biobased epos resin composite under the problem domain of “Materials and Technologies for Fire Suppression/ Protection” in October 2020. Out of 65,000 individual participants, he has cleared three rounds and received a third prize of ₹ 3 lakh in individual category from Minister for Defence Rajnath Singh at a function held recently.
The idea was also approved by jury members of the DRDO contest for proposal submission under Technology Development Funding (TDF) scheme for a funding of upto ₹10 crore. The student was guided by R. Ravi Kumar, M. Kirupa Sankar and A. Vimalarasan, faculty in-charges at the lab.
Explaining about the project, Mr. Pravin said that over 1.13 lakh deaths happen due to fire accidents in the country every year of which 284 deaths happened due to aircraft crashes in the country. After analysing the reasons for various fire and aircraft accidents, it was found that enhancing the fire retardant of composite can reduce the severity of accidents. Commercially available composite contains petroleum based products that have the capability to catch fire when exposed to high temperature and it is not eco-friendly. So we are in need of flame retardant composite by using natural and renewable resources.
For the flame retardant property, he has used nanoparticles obtained from natural resources and incorporated those flame retardant nanoparticles onto our natural fibre composite thus making our whole product as biocompatible and biodegradable. “This idea is novel and it is eligible for patent too”, he added.
