March 9, 2010
Amrita School of Engineering, Bengaluru
 

Vidyuth is a new technical forum constituted by the students of Electrical and Electronics Engineering at the Amrita School of Engineering at Bengaluru. Meant to promote innovation, the forum was formally inaugurated on February 5, 2010 by Dr. Venkateshwaran Narayanan, Research Head at ABB Bangalore.
 

The very first activity of the forum was a seminar on Wavelet Applications in Control Systems Engineering, delivered by Dr. Gopinath S, Scientist at ABB Bangalore. “What started out as a group of students interested in developing simple circuits has today become a full-fledged association,” the students proudly noted.
 

Given below is a short report on the activities the student forum has undertaken thus far.
 

As a group, we began learning about simple basic electronic components and their importance. Here we encountered one of the most basic and powerful integrated circuit (IC) — the 555 timer. Within one week’s time, we learnt as much as we could about this particular component.
 

 
We realized that we could share this learning with our peers; therefore we organized a workshop on the 555 timer IC. The workshop emphasized the applications of this IC. We implemented the dark detector, mono stable multivibrator and the astable multivibrator circuits using this IC.
 

All of this helped us thoroughly understand the concepts underlying one of the most commonly used and powerful ICs in the semiconductor industry.
 

Another recent event was an industrial visit we organized to the Power Grid Corporation at Hosur in Karnataka. Students of sixth semester made this trip in two batches on February 27 and March 7. Students learned about the power grid in complete detail.
 

We visited the control room, the switching yard, the distribution board, the battery room and the in-house generator and coolant sections. In the control room, we understood the one-line diagram of a power system in a practical sense and visualized the concepts we had learned in class.
 

In addition to the one-line diagram, we also gained an exposure to the power line communication system, control of relays during fault and the complete process of safe power transmission. The visit to the distribution and transformer sector gave us a clear idea of the various stages of power distribution and their importance. We learned about the actual model of a transformer.
 

At the switching yard, we could visualize corona and other effects that we had studied in our previous semesters. We could appreciate the concept of insulators and circuit breakers that were used in the transmission system. Visiting the in-house generator and cooling system, we could understand the effort put in to ensure safe and efficient transmission of power.
 

In the coming weeks and months, Vidyuth plans to conduct many more invited talks, discussion forums, workshops and project display events. We thank the management and faculty for their whole-hearted support. We especially thank our Forum Coordinator, Dr. Manjula G. Nair and our Staff In-charge, Mr. Ilango K.
 

– By Amith Kumar, Shreyas H. M., Mayuri R (4th year), Sharath Sundar Ram S., Unnikrishnan Menon, Sekhar S, Venkat Narayan (3rd year), J. Dharma Teja, Rishu Sharma, Preethi S. P., Ajay Prabhu (2nd year)