Malavika Vasishta Bagepalli and her research team from Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, U.S.., made it into the Guinness World Records by designing a ceramic-based mechanical pump capable of containing and circulating liquid tin at a temperature range between 1,200C and 1,400C tested for over 72 hours.
A release issued here has stated that Ms. Bagepalli is an alumna of Manipal University’s engineering programme offered by the International Centre of Applied Sciences (ICAS). She belongs to the 2010-12 Mechanical Engineering batch. Georgia Institute of Technology is ranked 71 in QS World University Rankings 2017. Radhakrishna Aithal, ICAS Director, said Ms. Bagepalli was a top performing student at ICAS with a CGPA of 3.29 out of 4. After completion of two years in Manipal she got transferred to the prestigious Ohio State University, U.S. under the twinning engineering programme. Later, she joined Georgia Institute of Technology, as research assistant.
Mr. Aithal said, “The whole ICAS family is glad and proud of its alumnus, Malavika, for her outstanding research accomplishment. While wishing her more such laurels to follow, I am sure it would give a lot of motivation and inspiration to all ICAS students pursuing the International Transfer Programme in Engineering.”
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The guide for the project is Asegun Henry and the others in the team include: Caleb Amy, Diane England, and Daniel Budenstein. The demonstration for the record was held on January 23, 2017, at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia. The time taken to complete the project is two years and five months. The research group’s pump is unique as they use ceramic instead of metal, an inorganic, non-metallic material that has a brittle nature.
The ceramic pump is directly exposed to the heated liquid tin, thus is able to operate at extremely high temperature, unlike other pumps which often require a cooling system to perform, the release added.