KPIT Sparkle announces 2023 Innovation Challenge winners

KPIT Technologies, a global partner to the automotive and mobility ecosystem for making software-defined vehicles a reality, hosted the finale of KPIT Sparkle 2023 on March 19, 2023. KPIT Sparkle is an annual national design and development innovation contest for Engineering, Science, and Design students. The event was held at the company's Pune campus.

The contest has been a powerful catalyst for driving mobility and sustainable energy innovation for the last decade. The platform brings together mentors and young professionals passionate about mobility and energy, building an ecosystem that encourages and inspires budding professionals to solve everyday problems with innovative, sustainable & indigenous solutions.

The event culminated with the announcement of the winners in multiple categories, who received a total of 1.1MN INR. The Gold award of INR 5,00,000 was won by Team Rejuvenators from IIT Kharagpur for developing an energy-efficient route for the recovery of metallic values from end-of-life batteries and reusing them for new battery making. The team developed a robust hydrometallurgical circuit for selective recovery of metallic values from different types of batteries (LCO and NMC).

Team Waste2Wealth from Government College of Engineering, Jalgaon won the Silver award of INR 2,50,000 for developing W2W Energy, Fuel and Mobility Generation from Innovative Biogas Plant. Team Propellers from Kalinga Institute of Industrial technology, Bhubaneshwar won the Silver award of INR 2,50,000 for developing a Novel solar electric thruster propulsion system for Nano to Micro Satellite for Indian Space Technology.

Finally, Team Energizers from Kongu Engineering College, Perundurai won the Most Popular Award of INR 1,00,000 for Designing and developing an efficient indigenous hydrogen (HHO) generation system by dry cell electrolysis method.

The finalists were evaluated by a jury comprising national and international experts from various fields, including academic, business, automotive, and technology, along with multiple leaders from KPIT Technologies.

The jury members included:

• Dr. Sanjeev Srivastava, Chief Operating Officer (I-STEM) at IISC Bengaluru
• Dr. Siddhartha Mukhopadhyay, Professor and Head, Department of Electrical Engineering and School of Energy Science & Engineering at IIT Kharagpur
• Pradeep Chandrashekhar, Associate Director/Deputy Chief Engineer at OLA Electric Car
• A.S. Ravikumar, General Manager - Product Engineering at Daimler India Commercial Vehicle
• Balkrishna Mahajan, Founder Director, and Principal Designer at Ticket Design
• Dr. Somnath Sengupta, Asst Prof at IIT Kharagpur
• Dr. Milind Rane, Professor, and Head Heat Pump Lab at IIT Bombay
• Dr. Pallavi Bharadwaj, Assistant Professor, IIT Gandhinagar
• Dr. Nisha Singhania, Manager at Altotech
• Dr. Daniel Goldsmith, Lecturer in Ethical Hacking and Network Security at Coventry University
• Rashmi Rao, Industry Manager - Automotive at MathWorks
• Shobhit Shrotriya, MD R&D life sciences at Accenture
• Pritesh Doshi, Head of Mechatronics and Electrification at DANA
• Vijay Kadam, Head of Commercial Vehicle Business Unit at DANA

KPIT Sparkle continues to inspire and recognize innovative ideas and solutions from the next generation of engineers and designers.