IIT Gandhinagar gets ₹20 lakh grant for developing India’s first indigenous cooling technology for EVs

02 Jul 2026, 06:29 by KalingaTV Bureau · KalingaTV

A research team from Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar has bagged a seed grant of ₹20 lakh to develop India’s first indigenous liquid cooling technology. Dubbed ‘Advanced Chill Tech,’ this homegrown invention is aimed at heavy-duty applications such as electric vehicles, AI-powered data centres, railways and high-performance electronics and provides a low-cost, sustainable, leak-proof alternative to expensive imported systems.

The breakthrough comes at a time when cooling needs for rapidly growing AI infrastructure and thermal management safety for electric vehicles are becoming primary constraints for Indian industries. The innovation eliminates production, energy and material wastes and carbon emissions by replacing traditional processes with a one-step solid-state manufacturing process. One of its immediate, proven applications is in high-speed rail and metro coaches, where it successfully cools high-power electronic systems.

Technically, the team achieved this by introducing an approach called ‘Friction Stir Channeling’ to manufacture liquid cold plates, metal components with internal channels used to dissipate excessive heat. Conventional industry methods rely heavily on vacuum brazing, a capital-intensive process that joins multiple components at high temperatures but suffers a low success rate of 40% to 60%, leaving behind hidden defects and catastrophic electrical or thermal leak hazards. The FSC technique uses a rotating tool to plastically deform a single metal plate, rather than fusing multiple joints, to create integrated, seamless internal channels without melting the material.

The project is led by Dr Amit Arora, Associate Professor, Department of Materials Engineering, IITGN, and final year PhD students Ms Prachi Sharma, who optimised the channel geometry with thermal simulations, and Mr Rizwan Qureshi who headed the manufacturing process. The team and its industry partner Epsilon Engineering Pvt. Ltd. have filed a joint Indian patent application titled “A Friction Stir Channelled Cooling Plate”. The technology is already at Technology Readiness Level 7, and the biggest prototype has been validated to withstand structural pressures of more than 35 bar, well above the requirements for basic industrial applications.

The team presented their innovation at ‘MATRIx 2026, organised by Indian Institute of Metals and got the funding of ₹20 lakh. The group plans to use this seed grant to help bridge the gap between success in the lab and deployment in the market by supporting larger scale testing, intellectual property development and eventual commercialisation. This milestone is backed by a decade of research on friction-stir based manufacturing and provides a major boost to the domestic production ecosystem in line with the ‘Make in India’ and ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’ missions.

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