MAKE IN ROORKEE

How Asia's oldest engineering college, IIT Roorkee, is staying ahead of the curve with groundbreaking research and extensive collaborations

- BY ABHINAV SINGH

One of the most striking aspects of the department of hydro and renewable energy at IIT Roorkee is a real-time digital simulator for hydropower plants. It responds in real time, just like a hydropower plant, and uses training consoles and controls identical to those used for day-to-day operations—so, the simulated environment and real-time system share the same look and feel.

The simulator was sponsored by the ministry of new and renewable energy and is a vital addition to the department because hydropower plant engineers need training to develop a feel for the dynamic behaviour of a plant under normal and abnormal conditions. They also need to make decisions under abnormal operating conditions to avoid damage to the plant. The department also has a facility for real-time testing of turbines in real conditions. Tests are conducted on scaled models on scaled hydraulic conditions.

The BTech course started last year and Vatsal Jain, who hails from Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, is one of the engineers in the making. He said it was dynamic and has “parts of electrical engineering and chemical engineering, as energy can be generated trough different sources”. Jain's long-term vision is to become an entrepreneur in the energy field.

IIT Roorkee, which started as Roorkee College in 1847, was the first engineering college in Asia. It was rechristened the Thomason College of Civil Engineering in 1854 after James Thomason, the East India Company's lieutenant-governor of the North-West Provinces, who had died in 1853. After about a century, the college was elevated to the University of Roorkee, the first engineering university of independent India, on November 25, 1949, and to an IIT on September 21, 2001.