KARSTEN MIRANDA
Karsten@herald-goa.com
PANJIM: With fuel prices skyrocketing and rising garbage woes, a group of five final-year mechanical engineering college students from Padre Conceição College of Engineering Goa (PCCE), are working on a solution that could tackle both problems and more.
Simply put, it produces fuel from plastic waste.
And their well-researched project, titled ‘Waste Plastic Pyrolysis’ has been selected as the top 15 ideas, amongst ideas from worldwide contestants, at the recently-held Middle East and Africa’s (MEA) Energy Innovation Hubs Hackathon at Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (UAE).
The students had earlier presented their idea at the Hackathon following which they had undergone a 3-day mentoring programme on converting the project idea into a business model.
The students, who represented India under the banner of Goa University, were amongst other students from India-based universities who had also represented the country at the finals of this global event. There were also students representing Universities of the countries such as Malaysia, UAE, Morocco and Mexico.
The international recognition to their project on sustainable and clean environment has certainly brought laurels to the institute and the State of Goa
The five students – Pralesh Kirloskar, Roshan Naik, Yuvraj Ghorpade, Mayuresh Naik and Sparsh Naik – guided by their department’s Assistant Professor Mohnish Borker, had earlier received the prestigious prototype funding from Goa State Innovation Council (GSInC), as their project to treat pollution was considered to be promising.
“Waste plastic is heated in the absence of air to produce liquid fuel which can find its applications in the automotive industry. Global plastic pollution and fuel crisis as well as the potential to replace the currently used diesel fuel impelled the students to think in this regard. The poly-fuel obtained via pyrolysis, is in three phases—gaseous, liquid and solid char; the liquid fuel having close resemblance to diesel. A conversion rate as high as 80 per cent reinforces the need to study and master this technique,” Borker said.
The students now look forward to taking up this project on a large scale by mass conversion of waste plastic to generate polyfuel at localised levels. Setting up pyrolysis reactors by municipal corporations, municipal councils and village panchayats will help local level waste management.
Speaking about the response they have received from the public to this achievement, Roshan Naik, the leader of the student group said they were very excited about the kind of exposure they have been getting.
“We feel great. Got time to do deep research during this lockdown,” Naik said, while thanking Borker for helping them throughout.
“Even the college has bought new equipment for manufacturing and we hope to use it and build a product which can be used in the market,” he added.
The project took into consideration the challenges that exist with the common approaches to tackling this man-made problem such as landfilling and incineration that have adverse effects on soil and air. A more sustainable approach was recycling; but it too proved to have its limitations arising vis-à-vis not having a defined segregation method for certain grades of plastics like polystyrene (PS); pre-treatment was another prominent reason which dampens recycling and more-ever at times has been found to be expensive and even inefficient.
Keeping that in mind and intrigued by the concept of reduce and reuse, these students worked on establishing a more viable approach to not only reducing plastic waste but also lessening the dependency on conventional sources of energy in the long run.
The novel technical method of ‘Pyrolysis’ currently also under research at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT-B), Powai was brought to fore by the project group at PCCE; thus advocating a simple, effective and inexpensive technique.