Students design micro-gas turbine

Tribune News Service

Jalandhar, August 4

Two pass-out students of B.Tech (mechanical engineering) from Dr BR Ambedkar National Institute of Technology (NIT) have come up with a novel project “Design and Fabrication of Micro Gas Turbine” which can produce 25 KW of power and light up 25-30 houses of a village or an urban locality.

The student duo of Prateek Dhawan and Anand Utsav Kapoor gave a demonstration of their project which they said was based on the mechanism of propulsion in a jet aircraft and gave a higher power efficiency. The students said they managed to devise the turbine which could use any fuel, including LPG, kerosene, biogas, natural gas or even diesel.

Demonstrating the working, they said, “The power producing rotor works at around 1.2 lakh revolutions per minute at the design point.” The students said they had designed the potable turbine using the rotor assembly from an automotive turbo-charger, fabricated the combustion chamber and lubrication system, all available locally. They said they could devise the turbine for an amount of Rs 60,000, the help for which also came from the institute’s incubator centre.

They added that the driving force for the project was to create a power source for remote areas where there was no availability of the grid and the engine could to be a viable solution due to its extremely high power to weight ratio.