Chennai
Dr Vikram Singh was bestowed the award, which carries a grant of Rs 15 lakh, at the Rastrapati Bhavan. The GYTI Awards celebrate the spirit of student innovation in all fields of engineering, science, technology and design through extremely affordable/frugal solution or the ones pushing the technological edge.
Dr Singh said, “Receiving the award was a big honour for me and I am delighted. I will be using the award grant to continue my research on white light emitting material from plant sources. I plan to research on RGB emitting carbon quantum dots from vegetables/fruits extract.”
Dr Singh elaborates that his project will have working application in the field of light-emitting diode (LED), which is used to make back light displays, light bulbs and tuneable lasers.
“Conventional LED use s both organic and inorganic dyes to create white light. In my project, I used a combination of pomegranate and turmeric to recreate the same. We get white light by combining red, green and blue emissions. We derive the red and blue emissions from the pomegranate, while the green emission is extracted from the turmeric. When we combine the emissions in equal quantity, it emits white light,” says Dr Singh.
The BIRAC-SRISTI award for biotechnological/medical/healthcare innovation is given to a technology having the potential to reach the masses and/or address a felt social need or making it extremely affordable, compared to the available solutions. Dr Singh’s project gains more credence due to the cost-effective method of creating white light.
“The approach I took to creates white light is cheap, environment-friendly and a green source, when compared to the conventional methods such as using phosphorous,” he adds. Prof Ashok Kumar Mishra, Department of Chemistry, who helped guide Dr Singh explains, “Plants are rich sources of many classes of molecules that absorb light and emit it in the visible wavelength ranges.
Our reported work shows that judicious choice of such molecules can provide cheap and environment-friendly sources of white light emission systems. This is essentially a ‘proof of concept’ work and further research is necessary to address the issues of molecular/material stability and device compatibility.” Dr Singh and Prof Mishra worked on the project for two years before publishing their results.
“The groundwork for the project was laid in 2012. The research findings were submitted in December 2014 and the same were published in the Nature Scientific Report in June 2015,” says Dr Singh. Dr Singh is currently conducting experiments to further the project.
“We still need to conduct more experiments to establish sustainability and electro luminous emission before the project can be used as a viable alternative to creating LED,” concludes Dr Singh.
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