Mumbai, May 28: Five Indian students have won the fourth edition of the Airbus Fly Your Ideas global competition organised in partnership with UNESCO to encourage the next generation of innovators.
The team of aerospace engineering students Sathiskumar Anusuya Ponnusami, Shashank Agrawal, Dhamotharan Veerasamy, Mohit Gupta and Ajith Moses have bagged the top prize of euros 30,000.
The winning team met for the first time at the final round of the event, as they worked from four different locations.
Two of the students were studying
at Indian Institute of Science Bangalore, one at the City University, London, one at Georgia Tech in the US and the another at the Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands.
These five students were selected out of 518 multi-disciplinary teams, representing 3,700 students from more than 100 countries, who submitted their ideas in December 2014 for the contest.
The team’s winning idea is all about good vibrations. It involves aircraft wings that are dressed in a composite skin that harvests energy from natural vibrations or flex in the wings.
“Piezoelectric fibres gather electrical charges from even the smallest movements during flight, storing the energy generated in battery panels integrated in the fuselage and using it to power auxiliary in-flight systems, like lighting and entertainment systems,” said Airbus in a statement.
“This reduces the energy footprint of aircraft during flight and could even replace the entire power source for ground operations,” said the statement. PTI