UPES team wins aerospace contest

Tribune News Service

Dehradun, March 22

Students of the University of Petroleum and Energy Studies (UPES) have brought laurels to the institution and the state.

The UPES team, “Tesseract “, beat IIT, Delhi, and BITS, Pilani, to emerge the national winner of the Lockheed Martin aerospace design challenge.

In the C130J Super Hercules Aircraft Roll On/ Roll Off University Design Challenge, the UPES team was declared the winner to enter the prototype phase. It was awarded a grant of US $40,000 to develop a prototype of the module. Now, Lockheed Martin will work with the UPES team to explore options with the government and the industry for a mature prototype for global markets.

Being the only team from Uttarakhand and one of the five selected teams from the entire country, it had in November 2014 made the state proud by qualifying the first round of innovative technology competition, launched by Lockheed Martin Corporation. The other four short listed teams were IIT, Madras, IIT, Delhi, Delhi Technical University and BITS, Pilani.

In the first phase, all participating institutes from across the country were required to submit their concept note. Only five institutes were shortlisted and were invited to present their concept in detail to the jury. The team from UPES qualified in the first phase and was selected to proceed to the second phase of this challenge. Lockheed Martin Corporation awarded Rs 15 lakh to UPES team “Tesseract “to facilitate and fund the expenses which the team was to incur in developing the detailed design of their concept, including site visits to Air Force stations and aeronautical centres.

Arun Dhand, director of media affairs with the UPES, said the team UPES, worked very hard towards the detailed designing of the project and left no stone unturned to emerge winner.

The students comprising the Team “Tesseract” are Megha Tangri, Arpit Jain, Preeti Sharma and Shatanu Kakkar from B Tech Aerospace Engineering; Shirish N Potu, Rishabh Jain and Madur Khanna from B Tech Automotive Design Engineering; Puja Singh, Shashank Sinha, Amitabh Yadav, Rahul Arora, Shreeparna Basu and Revant Pande from B Tech Electronics Engineering; Siddarth Rai, Upsam Rai Srivastava and Prashant Bajpai from B Tech Mechatronics Engineering; Pravesh Kumar and Kanishik from B Tech Mechanical Engineering and Tanushree Khattri from B Tech Power Systems Engineering.