This project aims to design and develop an indigenous, low-cost, remotely operated platform with state-of-the-art facilities available at Vel Tech, Chennai and NRSC, Hyderabad. It comprises a customised rugged platform with integrated propulsion, telemetry, and control electronics for water-based applications. The vehicle's design is focused on reducing the survey time and logistic efforts, which are critical in the waterbody surveys. Also, it will cater to the indigenously developed payload systems onboard for in-situ bathymetry and water quality assessments for evaluating water quality parameters derived from satellite remote sensing techniques.

Project outcome resulted in a novel sericin-based edible formulation with FDA-approved additives (Chitosan, Aloe Vera, Glycerin) that forms a transparent, antimicrobial film for food coating. This enhances the shelf life of tomatoes (21 days), strawberries (14 days), oranges (15 days), and bananas (9 days), potentially replacing synthetic wax-based coatings. Additionally, we augmented natural silk fabrics with nanoparticles synthesized via a green route using biochemicals (Aegle marmelos leaf extract, Ascorbic acid, Chitosan), incorporating Ag, Cu, and ZnO. These fabrics exhibit effective antibacterial and UV protection properties with minimal nanoparticle leaching, making the process cost-effective and simple.

Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) have emerged as cost-effective alternatives to conventional photovoltaics, where dye design plays a critical role in enhancing efficiency. In this study, novel D-D′-A dyes were synthesized and characterized using standard techniques. These dyes incorporate an N-aryl-substituted imidazole as the primary donor, an alkylated phenothiazine as the auxiliary donor, and rhodanine derivatives as the acceptor. Spectroscopic analyses confirmed that the rhodanine acceptors facilitate intramolecular charge transfer, resulting in strong visible light absorption with a high molar absorption coefficient. Time-resolved fluorescence decay measurements revealed nanosecond-scale excited-state lifetimes, enabling efficient electron injection into TiO2. Electrochemical and computational studies demonstrated well-aligned energy levels for effective charge injection and dye regeneration. Notably, the dye featuring a conjugated rhodanine acceptor achieved a power conversion efficiency of 6.96 ± 0.26%, comparable to the benchmark N719 dye, due to its high short-circuit current density (JSC) and open-circuit voltage (VOC). In contrast, the dye incorporating rhodanine-3-acetic acid, which relies on through-space charge transfer which suffers from severe recombination losses, yielding a much lower efficiency of 0.26%. These findings emphasize the advantages of conjugated rhodanine in enhancing DSSC performance, making it a promising candidate for photovoltaic applications.

Precision BrackishWater Aquaculture Technology using Machine Intelligence” is primarily for brackish water shrimp aquaculture deals with collecting the real time shrimp pond water quality parameters. These water quality parameters are vital for shrimp health and living lead to the design of water buoy a standalone IOT enabled device which collects the pH, DO, temperature, TDS, Turbidity from the shrimp ponds and data collected in the ponds will be sent to a cloud server through web applications dashboard and android application we can monitor the shrimp pond in real time gives alerts! and messages are provided to the farmers when a critical situation arrives Furthermore, a TinyML algorithm which is in embedded level programming which filters out the wrong data and gives out the accurate data of the shrimp pond thus, achieving the experimental error of ±0.5 for all the water quality parameters reducing the risk to famers and making it from high-risk high profit to low-risk high profit to famers.