Research Clusters

Transportation is growing faster than ever before. It is of utmost importance to develop futuristic solutions to provide safe, efficient, reliable, and sustainable transportation. The driverless cars, aerial-ground based delivery robots, on-demand public transport are already a reality. The intelligent transport system (ITS) uses ICT within infrastructure and vehicles to provide greener and safer transportation. The future will need intelligent techniques with high-speed communication networks to support the data-driven mobility market. It is also essential to look for novel material and renewable energy resources to metamorphose the way people and goods move around the world.

Vision
Develop innovative solutions for safe, sustainable, and efficient transport systems for local cities, India, and the world.

Objectives

• Develop safe solutions by handling problems in the areas of driver assistance systems, behavioural modeling, physical adversarial examples, and road safety. 
• Develop sustainable solutions by handling simulation studies in the EV charging infrastructure development, development of EV platform, and education in ITS.
• Develop efficient solutions by handling problems in the areas of C-V2X communication, vehicular signal processing, smart infrastructure-(parking), intelligent traffic flow and control, actionable data and decision support.
• To explore the sub-areas of ITS, which can benefit from the use and application of ICT/CS tools and technologies
• To develop solutions for ITS, categorised as follows:
  1. Support systems (Software and Hardware): 
     1. Examples: Parking systems, road safety audit systems, vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-node communications,  autonomous driving
  2. Standards/Frameworks/Tools:
     1. Examples: Ecosystem for electric vehicles

Chair and Co-Chair

Chair - Professor Mehul Raval
Cochair - Professor Mazad Zaveri

Members

Faculty:
Mehul Raval, Mazad Zaveri , Sanjay Chaudhary, Sanket Patel, Sham Gurav, Srikrishnan Divakaran, Shashi Prabh, Dhaval Patel, Maryam Kaveshgar, Kuntal Patel, Shefali Naik, Minal Pathak, Anurag Lakhlani, Pratik Trivedi

Industry Experts:
Sanjiv Kumar Jha, Manohar Patil, Ravi Darji, Sudhir Naik

The pharmaceutical sector mainly focuses on the development of drugs and active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) in India. The sector has many limitations in improving the productivity of existing plants since the employees are not well aware of the developments in science and engineering.  Considering the rapid growth of the pharmaceutical sector at regional and national level, this cluster has been planned. 

The research focus of this cluster will include process intensification using micro-reactors, conversion of batch to continuous processes, catalysis, rheology of emulsions, effluent treatment using advanced oxidation and membrane processes, solvent recovery, use of renewable energy, application of computational fluid dynamics to various unit operations and use of computational chemistry in various applications.

Vision
To develop novel solutions for increasing the productivity of pharmaceutical industries 

Chair and Co-Chair

Chair - Professor Deepak Kunzru
Cochair - TBD

Members

Faculty:
Deepak Kunzru, Dharmesh Varade, Arijit Ganguli, Aditi Singhal, Sridhar Dalai, Snigdha Khuntia, Dharamashi Rabari, Harshad Shah, Nitin Banker, Deepak Verma, Mitaxi Mehta.

List of Research Projects

Images/Visuals

Ahmedabad is well known for its textile and foundry industry. However, the businesses here are run in conventional way for many years. In order to stay competitive in the current world, it is very important to keep up with the advancements in the technology around the world. This industry is facing heavy competition from several countries in Asia like China. On the other hand academics are becoming more and more theoretical and disconnected from the industry. Manufacturing and Automation Cluster (MAC) is initiated with the aim of helping academics and industry for the growth of technology in India. 

We would like to focus on automations related to manufacturing in foundry and textile industry. We are initiating research projects those can help industry to improve their quality and reduce downtime. Such collaboration between industry and university would help both in many ways, such as relevant research, improved technology, placement for students, increased production and availability of required skills for industry. With this, our goal is to bring the Ahmadabad University at the forefront of advancements in the manufacturing industry.

Vision
Become number one university in India in manufacturing automation required for foundry and textile industry.

Objectives

• Create foundational courses in order to educate academics and industry for automation
• Initiate real world projects for automation in collaboration with industry
• Start research in collaboration with regional institutes and industries 
• Help foundry and textile industry for reducing downtime and increase production level
• Bridge the gap between academics and industry for student placements

Chair and Co-Chair

Chair - Professor Sham Gurav
Cochair - TBD

Members

Faculty:
Akhand Rai, Jaina Mehta, Keyur Joshi, Maryam Kaveshgar, Mitaxi Mehta

Industry Experts:
Dr. Aravind Chinchure, Mr. Maruti Pawar

List of Research Projects:

• Build a complete setup for predictive maintenance for the textile industry
• Develop Autonomous Guided Vehicle for foundry
• Develop technology and tools for active vibration monitoring of machines 
• Develop automated exoskeleton for lifting heavy metal material
• Develop Fatigue Testing machine