It was time for them to choose a project for their final year of B.Tech. 6 students from Sanskriti University, decided to do something else.
After much brainstorming and literature review, they settled on an electric buggy. It is a light off-road vehicle that can be used in both sandy and off-road terrains. The team designed and built a vehicle that will reduce pollution, but also challenge the current generation of off-road vehicles.
This buggy was designed and manufactured to increase the reliability and progress of electrification in the automobile industry. The buggy can carry up to 500 kgs of load. The buggy emits no emissions and has a speed of 40 km/h and runs a distance of 80 km.
Students from the final year of B.Tech Mech 2022 passed out batch – Thokchom, Satish Kumar, Deepak Kumar, Monu Poddar, Jivan Rajak, and Akhilesh Kumar Pal – under Professor Anshuman Singh, along with other faculty and staff of the Department of Mechanical Engineering.
“The students had done EV last year. The idea for buggy was zeroed in for two reasons. One was of course, this one running on electric will be definitely better, emission-free compared with the current buggies that are conventionally run on diesel or some such fuel,” Singh told.
It is secondly useful for racing, and students were keen to learn more about it. The Sanskriti University participates in the all-India Universities’ Racing Competition held by GoKart.
He said that the future prospects for this buggy model include integrating it with non-conventional energy resources and making it fully automated. The University will soon be the sponsor of a patent application in students’ names. The University also shares an incubator centre with the Government of India under the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises sector. This will allow the university to turn this idea into a commercial venture.
This venture was funded by Sachin Gupta, the Chancellor at Sanskriti University. Gupta said, “Governments worldwide are likely to promote the use of electric vehicles in the coming days as a measure to control air pollution. Recognising this, the students at our Sanskriti University dedicatedly designed an electric Buggy for travelling in sandy as well as off-road terrains.”