Kumaraguru College of Technology alumni S. Senthil Kumar, T. Sethupathi, E. Sivashanmugam and A.R. Swaminathan recently won the Cameron India Best Project award.
MoU
The engineering company’s (Cameron Manufacturing India Private Limited's) award flows from the memorandum of understanding it signed with the College to collaborate in erosion studies of flow equipment of oil and gas industry, advanced materials, specialised coating, sealing systems and lubrication.
The engineering company also gives ‘Best Student Award’. But both the awards are only for students from the Mechanical Engineering Department.
Toilets in train
This year, the aforementioned four young engineers won the award for the project they did during their final year of study in 2014. As students, they had worked on using electric power generated from wheels of running trains to clean toilets.
They will feed the power generated from the wheels on to air-pressurised flushing system to collect the waste in tank, which then can be used for treatment. The result: improve hygiene standards at train toilets.
Such air-pressurised flushing system is not new, though.
It is in use in aeroplanes, where using vacuum the waste is collected in tank. The system requires just about two litre water, which is far less than the six litre required for water-saving toilet and the 19 litres that old toilets use to flush out waste.
Mr. Senthil Kumar says that the toilet designed with vacuum flushing system turns into zero-discharge one, where waste gets collected in tank.
This will ensure that rail tracks are clean and also toilets. Plus, the other advantage is that the air-pressurised flushing system can also be used in buildings.
He adds that they are working to improve the project and apply for patent.
Prize
College principal R.S. Kumar says that the college selected three projects from among 20 and from the three, Cameron chose the aforementioned students’ project as the best. In recognition of the merit in the project, it gives Rs. 30,000 in prize.
This is not the first time that the engineering company has rewarded students. It has been on since 2009.
