Abha Misra, Professor in the Department of Instrumentation and Applied Physics, has been awarded the prestigious “BPCL Innovation Award 2023” under the “Net Zero Emission” category. S Yashonath, Emeritus Professor at the Solid State and Structural Chemistry Unit (SSCU) and Shubhadeep Nag, former student of SSCU, received the award under the “Energy Efficiency” category. An MoU has been signed between Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited (BPCL) and IISc for research and development to develop a joint technology. The awards were presented by Padma Vibhushan Anil Kakodkar, Chair, Scientific Advisory Committee at the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, at an event held in Mumbai.
BPCL and IISc will team up to develop scalable energy generation and storage systems for efficient conversion of waste heat and waste carbon. The deployment of waste-to-product technology is a way to shift oil industries towards attaining the Net Zero Mission. Under energy efficiency, Prof Yashonath’s project aims at developing highly efficient separation methods for separating molecular mixtures, especially hydrocarbon mixtures. This will help reduce the energy requirement for separation processes and also yield very high purity single components.
