Three Mechanical and Process Engineering final year undergraduate students from the faculty got a golden opportunity to spend their 12 week special industrial training period as summer research interns at the (IITGN) Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India. The expenses in India was totally sponsored by the IITGN. The students were engaged in this research internship program from the 27th of March to the 16th of June 2017.
The students used this internship program as a chance to test-drive their knowledge and skills gained from their three years undergraduate education in Mechanical and Process Engineering. They took up research projects to work on, based on their areas of interest.
Dinusha Wickramaarachchi, who is much interested in sustainable energy sources, renewable energy development and conservation of energy was selected to be a member of the IITGN SRIP (Summer Research Internship Program) Solar Study Team out of 550 applicants. The Solar Study Team which consisted of 8 student members was supervised by Prof. K. Chelvakumar who is a visiting professor and the former president of EPIR Technologies (Chicago); a company which broke the world record in Cd-Te Solar Cell Open Circuit Voltages (Voc) by a 45% margin in 2009. The team was very successful and published a book titled “Solar Power in India: Past, Present and 2022” recently on July 14th of 2017. The faculty congratulate Dinusha and the team for their achievement.
Mr. Nidershan and Mr. Neethan, who are interested in applications of robotics, embedded systems and the biomedical applications of robotics in rehabilitation got a chance to work at the Robotics Lab of IITGN on a research project with two other IITGN students under the supervision of Asst. Prof. Vineet Vashista. The overall target of the team was to develop a lower-limb prosthesis with refinements to make walking a less energy consuming task. The target of this research training was to set a basement for further development and future studies to be conducted at the Lab.
At this moment the faculty extends its sincere gratitude to our university administration, IITGN and to Prof. Chelvakumar who was instrumental in launching this kind of research internships for the students.
As it is well known that nothing can substitute real experience the Faculty of Engineering, University of Jaffna always strives to provide the best of training to its undergraduates during both the general and special industrial trainings to compete not only with in the country but also at international levels. As always the faculty will continuously commit to bring the best to its students.
