City explorer: The benefits of research

Do you know about the contributions of IIT-Madras’ Research Park to our everyday lives? GEETA PADMANABHAN lists a few

November 01, 2016 04:19 pm | Updated 04:28 pm IST

IIT Madras Photo: M. Srinath

IIT Madras Photo: M. Srinath

During the floods last year, the IIT campus went without power for four days. Even after the gen-sets failed, one home glowed like a beacon. Thanks to a 125-watt solar panel. The office-table-sized solar panel brought in DC power to run lights, fans and laptops, and charged mobile phones. “DC-Solar runs lights, fans, computers… everything in this office!” says Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala, Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT-Madras.

IIT-Madras’ tech successes have helped push Chennai into a new age of research and innovation. And, IIT’s Research Park tops that list. An incubation hub where 100-plus companies enjoy facilities for R&D work, the Park is now moving into a second building with an innovative cooling system. “While Bangalore and Hyderabad were taking the cream of the talent, Chennai was being relegated to third spot. We needed to get back the mojo,” says Prof. Jhunjhunwala.

WLL

The audience at the Science Congress held in Chennai in January, 1999, sat up at what looked like a miracle then — a low-cost wireless system created by IIT-M that provided high-speed Internet access, while leaving the telephone line free to place/receive calls. Based on IIT’s Wireless-in-Local-Loop (WLL) technology, it used radio-frequency waves instead of cables to send/receive signals. Calls from Internet subscribers terminated at the remote access switch (RAS) at the subscriber’s exchange. This reduced congestion and making/receiving calls became possible even when the Net was being accessed. It ensured high-quality phone/fax services in Chennai, was cheaper than wired lines, connected the PC directly to the WLL subscriber terminal, gave 35 kilobytes/second (KBPS) Internet access (upgradable to 70 KBPS). “We first installed it in a establishment in Besant Nagar,” says Prof. Jhunjhunwala.

DC Home

A model of a DC Home is now a permanent exhibit at the Research Park. The message it’s putting out — DC-powered buildings are green. LEDs are best powered by DC, all e-appliances need DC power. It’s not smart to take solar power to the home-grid through multiple conversions and then convert it to DC to activate devices. So, IIT-M set up a DC home-microgrid with a solar PV, a battery, and an incoming AC grid to drive DC loads. A solar DC microgrid assures uninterrupted power supply to homes already on the power grid, but who experience load-shedding. Power bills plummet when you do away with inverters, when the meter records less consumption, and when the solar panel produces DC power at a cheaper rate and keeps conversion loss to a minimum.

Uniphore

In Uniphore at IIT’s lab, a handful of geeks developed a globally-accepted voice engine that speaks and responds to 16 Indian languages. Its cutting-edge speech-recognition software allows people to access the Internet in their own language — all they need are basic phones and voice biometrics. It means someone who can’t read or write can perform financial transactions through the Jan Dhan Yojana scheme by speaking into his phone in a language he knows.

Farmers use it to locate good markets and the right price. About 10,000 farmers have been counted as users of Indian voice engines to listen to Q&A programmes. Others use it to learn English and correct their pronunciation, says Umesh Sachdev, founder, Uniphore. In Chennai, the Election Commission adopted it for roll upgradation, says Prof. Jhunjhunwala.

HTIC

At the Healthcare Technology Innovation Centre, Prof. Mohanasankar Sivaprakasam and his team have been putting together accessible, affordable, scalable solutions for problems in healthcare. The Centre’s Mobile Eye Surgical Unit (MESU) can roll into the remotest rural area, ready to perform high-quality cataract surgeries in a controlled, sterile environment. “The unit uses the first-of-its-kind technology in the country,” says Prof. Mohanasankar. “It has performed 3,300 surgeries with no post-op complications in places with no basic amenities. It has won GOI approval.”

Neo-natal ambulance

In collaboration with EMRI, the largest emergency service provider in the country, and the Tamil Nadu Government, HTIC developed a neo-natal ambulance design and technical specifications for neonatal ambulances in the State. Around 65 neonatal ambulances for Tamil Nadu were developed based on this new design and deployed for public service.

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