Prof. Krishnan B.| He X-Rays Bridges & Planes | He Left USA to Build Non-Destructive Testing | Ep. 8

Unlike X, SpaceX is not going to go away that easily, okay? If anything, Space- SpaceX will keep growing. That's my belief, that when you have deep tech... So we are just not curating ideas, we are curating entrepreneurs.

Right.

We are curating faculty who become entrepreneurs. Uh, Reliance actually say, "I'm, uh, going to actually support this work, and what- whatever we help you productize it, and we want you to try it out on our... And we will also buy 200 of these sensors if it works." [upbeat music]

Hi, my name is Amrit. We've heard that IIT Madras is the best place to build. [upbeat music] So we've come down to the Sudha and Shankar Innovation Hub. We want to meet some people. These are builders. We want to talk to them about their work, and also ask them, "What makes IIT Madras the best place to build?" [upbeat music] Hi, welcome to the Best Place to Build podcast. We are sitting today with Professor Krishnan Balasubramanian, who is a professor at, in mechanical engineering at IIT Madras. He's a very well-accomplished and very well-loved professor, award-winning professor. Recently, uh, in 2017, won the Abdul Kalam National Innovation Fellowship. Uh, welcome to the podcast, Professor.

Thank you, Amritash.

Professor-

Very happy to be here.

Uh, and, uh, also, I might just start off by saying that I was a student of yours in, in your class in 2003, '4, uh, first year, second year. So I have memories from the class also. So really happy that I'm meeting you again after so many years. Uh, Professor, you've had a long, um, career in IIT Madras, and you're obviously associated with a lot of things. But let's start from the beginning. Uh, your- can you talk to us about your research area and, uh, the work that you do as a pr- as a faculty member?

Thank you, Amritash. Um, it's, it, it looks, feels lo- uh, very short, but it's probably 24, 5... It's getting to be close to 25 years since I returned back from US and joined IIT Madras. Um, my area of expertise is in an area called as non-destructive testing, which, to many of you, may be foreign language. But essentially, you all remember that whenever you have anything to do with your health, you go to a doctor, and then the doctor says, "Go, go get an ultrasound done. Go get an X-ray done." What you do is you look inside your anatomy, and you're able to find out if there everything is okay or if something is not okay. Now, imagine the number of the, uh, you know, engineered, uh, structures and components that you use every day, whether it's a car, so you're taking a flight, you are in a train, you're using the rail, you're using the bridge, crossing a bridge. You have pipelines, you know, transporting gas to your h- home. You have, uh, sewage lines. Each of them are all good when you're building it, and then over a period of times, things start to go wrong. And when things go wrong, either you- things become unavailable to you. Imagine suddenly that you have a flight that's canceled because of some maintenance issue. Now, if I can prevent that by letting you know that this c- plane has a problem, and then when it's not being used, you fix it, then it becomes available for you every time. Of course, you can also look at it from a different perspective, that we are looking at safety. So if you look at the number of catastrophic incidences that happen, uh, if I can prevent many of them, then that is a mission that we are embarked on. So we look inside materials, we look inside components, engineered component, we look inside structures, just the way a diagnostic center just down the road from you looks inside your anatomy and says whether you have a valve that is not working or whether it's a heart that is, you know, blocked. Exactly the same thing we do, but big difference is that your anatomy has not changed in zillion years. On the contrary, engineered materials change almost every year. Components are, I guess, redesigned every couple of years. So our problem and challenges are evolving on a daily basis, and we have to keep solving newer and newer problem because we have new materials, new problems associated with new materials. I can give you an very- one good example. Um, I remember many years ago, the railways came to me and says, told me that the wheels are cracking up, and there have been accidents because of that. And the reason why that happened was because they changed the brake pad from a metal brake pad to a composite brake pad. Why did they do that? They did that because composite brake pads actually stop your train much closer. So within about, uh, 500 meters, you could stop the train, before the train was, would take two me- kilometers to stop. So that looked like a brilliant advantage. But what they didn't realize or, uh, or probably what the challenge here was, that the kinetic energy that you have has to be dissipated in 500 meters what was dissipated in two kilometers. So now you have heat that's heating up your wheels a lot faster, and then your metallurgy is not able to take it. So now they wanted to know whether I can predict which wheel is going to fail so that they can remove it out before anything bad happens. So-... we can do this by many of the NDT methods that are available today. So thank you.