Engineering students design green car

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Four mechanical engineering students of Prince Shri Venkateshwara Padmavathy Engineering College, Ponmar, 9 km from Medavakkam, have designed a hybrid car as part of their final-year project. While their classmates chose to do projects at automobile companies, the four students — M. Vishnupriya, M. Aristo, R. Manikandan and M. Poorna Chandran — designed their own car and have applied for patent adding some additional features to their green car.

“In the third year, we did a mini project on compressed air engine for motorbikes. Also, we had an automobile engineering subject, in which we studied about hybrid cars.

These hybrid cars consist of fuel engines along with electric motors to drive the car. From this concept we thought we could replace the fuel engine with pneumatic engine so that we can reduce pollution and fuel usage.

We started working on this from last September,” said Aristo. It took nearly eight months for them to fabricate a hybrid combination of pneumatic and electric energy source car that runs with electric energy and is recharged by compressed air energy.

“Our main aim was to fabricate a car with dual energy sources – pneumatic and electric energy. The invention of electric cars and pneumatic cars were made in order to concentrate on green technology in automobiles,” explained Vishnupriya.

Mr J. Jai Bhaskar, HoD, mechanical engineering, and project coordinator, said, “At first, I was skeptical, but these students were confident that they could, and made it.”

While college chairman, Dr K. Vasudevan, encouraged the students and gave them Rs 1 lakh, the students spent another Rs 25,000 on the prototype.

“Ashok Gandhi, assistant professor of Sri Sairam Engineering College, evaluated the project and he appreciated these students’ efforts,” said college principal T. Soundararajan.