About
From the Head’s Desk
Department of Mechanical Engineering
The purpose of education is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.
These great sayings cue the Department of Mechanical Engineering in putting a wholesome effort in instilling the worth of knowledge among the students. The Department along with its strong faculties, on behalf of IIT Indore, an academic platform of international repute, is dedicated to the service of training and building educated minds, confident to work and excel in their respective fields in future. We believe that besides learning from books and examples, practically performing things learnt help to achieve soundness of knowledge. With this view, the department operates with a prerogative of combining classroom teaching with the state-of-the-art laboratory facilities for all the subjects. Complete attention is paid towards the exercise of prudence and care in the management of resources to render basic and specialized engineering education necessary to keep pace with the present and emerging requirements of the society.
The Department of Mechanical Engineering, IIT Indore runs undergraduate and post-graduate programs in the form of B.Tech. and M.Tech. (Production and Industrial Engineering) along with Doctoral and Post-Doctoral research schemes with its potent workforce of fifteen faculty members and one research scientist. The Department focuses on four major streams of studies, viz., Thermal Engineering, Manufacturing Technology, Design and Applied Mechanics, and Industrial Engineering. The Department also takes equal responsibility in contributing towards the advancements of knowledge by conducting research works at the cutting edge level bearing social relevance. Taking one step further, the Department runs Continuing Education Programs (CEP) for the academic professionals and practicing engineers of industries to develop a confluence of academics and applications.
Thermal engineering faculties work in the areas of renewable energy, energy storage and heat and mass transfer. The research interests include hydrogen storage, CO2 sequestration, heat transfer in plate with impinging jets, micro-channel heat transfer, absorption cooling, low-temperature combustion engine, bio-fluid mechanics and CFD. Faculties of manufacturing technology are actively participating in the areas of gear manufacturing, laser assisted micro-manufacturing, smart materials and structures, laser and thermally sprayed ceramic coatings, tribology and solid lubrication. Design and applied mechanics group is contributing in condition monitoring, noise and vibration isolation, computational solid mechanics, finite element methods, micromechanics and nanomechanics, nanotechnology in engineering, fracture mechanics, signal processing of mechanical systems, dynamic analysis and controller development of robotic manipulators and systems This group has developed a novel indirect adaptive control scheme for the underwater vehicle-manipulator systems and identified a new family of parallel robotic motion platforms. The robotics group has received the Department of Higher Education funding for establishing a Teaching Learning Centre for “Internet of Things”. Industrial Engineering group is working on reliability engineering, prognostics and intelligent manufacturing operations planning.
The faculties of the Mechanical Engineering Department are working in various projects jointly with several inter-disciplinary centres, such as, Metallurgy and Materials Science, Bioscience and Bio-engineering and Astrophysics. A group of researchers have formed “Centre of Excellence in Gear Engineering” to strengthen research on different aspects of Gear Engineering such as gear finishing, miniature gear manufacturing, gear metrology, noise and vibration analysis, functional testing, failure analysis, condition monitoring and diagnosis, prognosis and reliability prediction, surface treatment, laser shock peening. The group has received DST-FIST funding to strengthen the infrastructure in gear research. The Department runs several sponsored projects in basic and applied research areas of mechanical engineering in close collaboration with various Public Sector Units, research institutes and industries namely, RRCAT, BPCL, BARC, DRDO, JCB-India, Volvo-Eicher, L&T and so onwards. The results of active industry partnership and applied research can be visible in terms of several international journal and conference publications along with a good number of patents filed till date.
The Department promotes students to participate in competitions related to technology and innovation, such as, BAJA-SAE and AAKRUTI. Our undergraduate students are involved in research works on the development of several product prototypes. Noteworthy attempts include a Robotic Fish; an artificial one, manufactured using smart materials. This will be useful in deep sea explorations and operations related to leading a shoal of fish away from a disaster site. Another is the work of building a robotic framework to assist in the rehabilitation and therapeutic support to legs posterior to a trauma.
Some of the highlights of the achievement of the Department are Dr. Bhupesh Kumar Lad receiving Royal Academy of Engineering, UK Newton-Bhabha Research Grant (GBP 50000); Dr. Santhakumar Mohan receiving the Alexander von Humboldt Research fellowship, Germany; Dr. I.A. Palani receiving Sathyabama University Alumni award in Research and Innovation for the year 2015. Undergraduate students of Mechanical Engineering Department have received best BTP project Award and best Working Prototype Award in 1st Annual Student Research Symposium (SRS). IIT Inodre’s Smart Manufacturing Team won the best Student Project Demo award (under technology category) in “Manufacturing Today Summit” organized by Aditya Birla Group and ITP publishing.
HOE-ME