Socially Relevant Research

A number of nationally relevant research projects, e.g., in sectors of defense, medicine environment, energy, health, infrastructure, etc. There are a large number of projects undertaken by IIT Kanpur which contribute to the national development goals and priorities. Some representative activities in these areas are briefly mentioned below.

Environment

In the area of environment, IIT Kanpur has several activities such as the Ganga River Basin Environment Management Programme (with IIT Kanpur being the lead/nodal institute), development of a zero discharge toilet, climate models, development of air quality standards which have been accepted by the Govt. of India with notification in the gazette for implementation, development of an air quality index for dissemination of information to the people and for policy making.

Energy

In the area of energy, development of an electronic fuel injection for diesel locomotives to reduce fuel consumption, photovoltaics, solar-hydrogen generation, connection of solar cells to the grid in a smart manner, grid stability are some of the activities.

Materials

In the area of materials, there are a large number of activities ranging from metallurgical applications, composites for aircraft materials, biomaterials for aircraft applications, electronic materials for devices. In the area of mechanics, there are projects with IGCAR. In the area of infrastructure development, there are projects for housing, roadways, bridges etc.

Computing

In the area of computing, there are projects on computational fluid dynamics, drug and materials design, development of Agropedia, encryption algorithms for defense needs, smart card technologies, and telemedicine, and several other activities supported by the High Performance Computing facility.

Telecommunications

In the area of telecommunications, several activities have been conducted under the auspices of the BSNL Telecom Centre of Excellence such as a digital “mandi” for farmers, plant designs for rural telecom applications, optimizations for cellular telecom applications.

Defense

In the area of defense, there are several activities such as gas turbine enabling technologies for military aircraft, autonomous vehicles and helicopter, unmanned combat aircraft, materials development for defense applications, technologies for remediation of NBC threats and sensors for detecting explosives, activities with the ordinance factories, networking and communication systems. Also, several projects have been conducted by the National Wind Tunnel Facility for the missile programs.

Healthcare

In the area of healthcare, the activities are focused on neurodegenerative disorders, cancer and bone degeneration.

Other

Few more socially relevant research projects are as follows. Agropedia KMS: Agriculture Knowledge management systems on the cloud – as a Service vKVK: Virtual KrishiVigyan Kendra – advisory/alert delivery to the farmers over phones Agrotagger: automatic tagging(keyword assignment) for agriculture documents.