(a) Water Quality Monitoring Sensors - (i) BITS Pilani RIG and Grant of OPERA AWARD (18 Lakhs)
(ii) DSTE, Government of Goa (2 Lakhs)
At four out of 100 river water quality monitoring stations located in India, water is found to be unfit for use due to presence of copper beyond permissible limit. Moreover, chronic copper poisoning results in Wilson’s disease, which is characterized by hepatic cirrhosis, brain damage, renal disease, and copper deposition in the cornea. It is found that the electrochemical method for detecting trace heavy metals has attracted considerable attention in scientific literature due to its low cost, easy operation, good sensitivity, and high reproducibility. In this study, an electroless nano porous gold film (NPGF) was investigated through XRD and SEM. NPGF on further surface modification is an effective gateway to build nanosensors for heavy metal ion detection.
(Advanced Materials, TechConnect Briefs 2015)
(b) Polymer NanoComposites - Early Career Research Award (DST-SERB) - 31, 74, 281/-
An access to safe, persistent source of fresh water is the urgent need of 21st century. Desalination is considered an important alternative for obtaining fresh water source. Membrane-based Reverse Osmosis (RO) technology is one of the leading separation techniques that is used in various industries for separation either as unit separation process or as combination with other processes. Commercially, cellulose acetate and polyamide based polymers play an important role in reverse osmosis (RO) membranes. However, there is a requirement to produce high chlorine resistance with improved structural morphologies, porosities and anti-fouling abilities of desalination membranes.
(c) Ion Exchange Membranes
Electrodialysis (ED) is one of the growing technologies for various applications. In Electrodialysis, the most critical component is the polymeric membrane. Ion Permeable Membranes (IPMs), and Bipolar Membranes (BPs) are mainly used in Electrodialysis technology. Based on the current costs of materials used, the capital costs of full scale electrodialysis cells are orders of magnitude higher than those of current conventional wastewater treatment systems. Therefore, there is a demand for inexpensive ion permeable membranes and/or bipolar membranes without any compromise between selectivity, electrical resistance and dimensional stability.
(d) Microplastics Detection
Microplastics (MPs) are today a major pollutant, especially in marine ecosystems. Plastics are synthetic polymers and two major characteristics of plastics being durability and light weight make them so widely used include making waterbottles, tanks, containers, insulations, implants as packaging material among many others composed of varied shape like, pellets, fragments, films, foams, their color, size, polymer type and specific density. There has been a rise in global plastic production to 360 million tonnes in 2018 from 1.5 million tons in 1950 and portion of these plastics nearly 8 million tonnes through different pathways makes it to the ocean and by 2050 production is expected to intensify to 2000 million tonnes.
(e) Ion selective Sensors
Conventional microfabrication technologies have several drawbacks in 3D electrode fabrication. It is difficult to form 3D electrodes that have a micrometer scale thickness using thermal evaporation and sputtering. Since most of the techniques uses high energy beam to carve microstructures one at a time. Otherwise too much time would be required to pattern the large area leading to high capital investment. Especially, three dimensional (3D) electrodes are effectively used in a wide range of applications such as electronic circuit components, microsensors, microactuators, and microfluidic system. However, fabrication of microelectrode through 3D printing is still challenging because of the process and material limitations. Therefore, there is a need for integrated manufacturing process to fabricate sensors that consists of a micro-dispensing head and automatic control system.
(f) Microfluidics based Sensors for CAR-T Applications
Cancer is a disease in which abnormal cells divide uncontrollably and invade nearby tissues. They can also spread via the lymph system and blood. It is a deadly disease with an estimated 11,57, 294 new cancer cases diagnosed and 7,84, 821 cancer deaths reported in India in 2018 by the WHO (World Health Organization). Conventionally, cancer treatments include chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Although these techniques are practical, they pose many limitations like affecting tumor and normal cells alike being ineffective in eliminating tumor cells in all patients. One of the most emerging strategies is adoptive cellular immunotherapy. This technique comprises using cell subsets of the immune system for therapeutic purposes. CAR-T cell therapy have shown promising results as an applied therapy in which T cells are engineered with synthetic receptors called Chimeric Antigen Receptors (CARs).