Panjab University Celebrates Technology Day to highlight important role of Science in daily lives

Chandigarh June 3, 2019: Panjab University Celebrated the Technology Day to highlight the important role of Science in our daily lives and to encourage the students to embrace Science and Engineering as a career option, here today.
Professor M.D.Behera from IIT Kharagpur and Dr.Manish Arora, Coordinator Design Innovation Centre(DIC), IITBanaras Hindu University (BHU) were the main speaker of the event Awards were given to team members who created functional prototypes and presented the same at different National level platforms. Main attraction for the day was presentations of functional prototypes and technologies.
Centre of attraction for the event was"Design Innovation Centre" at UIET, PU.The Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), Govt. of India, as a part of the 12th Five Year Plan under the Scheme of National Initiative for Design Innovation (NIDI) sanctioned a programme to PU in 2015 with a grant of Rs 10 crores to set up a “Design Innovation Centre (DIC)” in Chandigarh region. This is to promote design focussed teaching and training courses and the creation of fabrication laboratories to design technologies and products of societal needs. The DIC at PU has been focussing on innovations around engineering products, and promoting early stage start-up companies. University Institute of Engineering & Technology (UIET) is the nodal department of the DIC at PU, and works in collaboration with three partner institutes i.e. Punjab Engineering CollegeDeemed to be University (PEC), Central Scientific Instrumentation Organization (CSIR-CSIO) and Dr.Harvansh Singh Judge Institute of Dental Sciences (HSJIDS), Chandigarh.
The DIC offers a number of elective courses under Choice Based Credit System at UG and PG levels, conducts hands-on training workshops and has developed a number of specialised Design Laboratories where students develop functional prototypes. This is an experience of the kind, normally available to students at the IITs and globally best institutes. At UIET, the design laboratories have been developed under three themes :Information Technologies&Traffic Sensing, Medical Devices & Restorative Technologies, Energy Harvesting & Management Technologies.
The DIC laboratories at UIET are highly sought after by the students for training and internships. The students trained at the DIC have been performing very well in national competitions, hackathons, research paper publications and job placements. One such team won national prize (Rs 1 Lakh) for best resolution of a problem in the field of network security in the Smart India Hackathon conducted by MHRD at PSIT, Kanpur in March, 2019. Nearly 2 lakh teams had given entries against some 230 problem themes. Another team trained at the DIC won the best prize under the theme Internet of Things at Deloitte TechnoUtsavhackathon held at Hyderabad in April 2019. Yet another reached the Grand Finale and wasgiven Pre Placement offer by Deloitte. These teams were felicitated on the occasion of Technology Day.The teams gave live demonstrations to mark the early successes of young students and faculty in engineering technologies at UIET, PU.
At the Design Laboratories, more than 1500 students have been trained, five technologies related to health are under clinical trials at IDS, PGIMER and GMCH, consultancy projects and MOUs with royalty terms have been signed up with industry, two StartUp companies have been set up, one patent has been filed, several companies have expressed interest in working with the faculty at UIET under the DIC. Nearly 50 types of ideas selected after idea competitions have been developed into prototypes. Out of these, about 30 prototypes are functionally validated and are ready for expansion of the projects for scale up, to develop larger or multiple functional products in partnership with industry.A CNC machine prototype developed at the DIC has been taken up for scale up, with 50% sponsorship by Esteem Industries at Baddi. A prototype of portable wind mill to generate localised electricity in rural settings has been developed. A GPS enabled autonomous aerial vehicle (drone) for collecting aerial and surface information, carrying payload etc. has been developed by a DIC team at UIET. The team working on medical technologies has mastered complete technology based on digital imaging and 3D printing to provide help to surgeons in bone reconstruction surgery following damage in an accident or damage by cancer etc.
Some of these technologies were demonstrated by students during the Technology Day function. Some of the projects raised the imagination of younger engineering graduates for taking up more complex and creative projects as their career challenges during their training at UIET.