Schneider electric announces the winners of innovation challenge 2008

Bangalore, Dec 18 (ANI/Business Wire India): Schneider Electric India Pvt. Ltd (SEI), a 100 per cent subsidiary of Schneider Electric Industries, hosted the 4th edition of Innovation Challenge. This is a unique contest to explore the budding engineering talent in India.

The focus of this contest is to make students think 'out of the box' and provide an opportunity to come up with innovative solutions to showcase efficient utilization of energy. The topics identified were "Electrification of rural areas at low cost", "Innovative solutions to optimize energy usage" and "Web and wireless technologies to measure, monitor and control energy". The foundation of this contest was laid in October 2005.

150 teams from numerous engineering colleges across India participated in the contest this year. The 10 teams which qualified to the finals were from BITS Pilani, MIT Manipal, HIT Kolkata, NIT Rourkela, KIIT Bhubaneshwar, IIT Kharagpur, MSRIT Bangalore and IIIT Hyderabad.

The esteemed judges who were present to evaluate the contestants were: Dr. Shreepad Karmalkar (Prof. EEE Dept., IIT Madras), M. Siddhartha Bhatt (Additional Director, ECDD CPRI), Dr. R. Nagaraja (MD, Power Research and Development Consultants Pvt. Ltd.), Ashok Hattangady (Director - Technology Development, Conzerv), S. Sumanth (Managing Director, Mescom), Veerendra Vasamsetty (Senior Tech Lead, Innovation and Anticipation, Schneider Electric) and Arunvel Thangamani (Senior CAE Analyst, Schneider Electric).

The participants were evaluated on the basis of quality of innovation, technical feasibility of solution, alignment to the contest theme and the proof of concept given.

MIT, Manipal represented by Mrityunjai and Arpit Gandhi, who presented "Solar Powered Embedded LED Street Lamp" won the 1st prize of Rs. 1,00,000/-. MIT, Manipal represented by Rupan Sarkar, Gaurav Kumar Barman and Pranab Purakayastha, who presented "Efficient Energy Management " won the 2nd prize of Rs. 75,000/-. IIT, Kharagpur represented by Debdutta Bhattacharya, Siddharth Ajith, Ankur Goel and Kaushik Kislay--, who presented "Electrification of Rural areas at low cost - Microbial Fuel Cell" won the 3rd prize of Rs. 50,000/-.

The contest was open to students of all engineering streams. Each team could propose their innovative ideas in accordance with the contest theme. The short-listed teams were invited to present their ideas/solutions at the Schneider R andD facility in Bangalore. Each team was allotted 30 minutes to present their idea and for Q andA. (ANI)