‘Tata Steel MaterialNEXT’ to bring together Industry and Academia on Advanced Materials
Chennai: Tata Steel Advanced Materials Research Centre (TSAMRC), in collaboration with the Entrepreneurship Cell, IIT Madras is hosting a competition ‘Tata Steel MaterialNEXT’ that offers a chance to the budding researcher, technology developer and enthusiasts in the field of advanced materials, to propose, produce and present their solution model to the existing industrial challenges and breakthrough innovations to experts.
‘Tata Steel MaterialNEXT’ evolves through a three-phase route with interactive mentoring sessions by the industry specialists and professors who are working in this field, at each stage. Finally, the top three solutions and teams get recognized and rewarded. Registration for ‘Tata Steel MaterialNEXT’ is open till January 12, 2019.
With the growing popularity of graphene and other advanced nanomaterials around the world, it is important to come up with solutions to the industrial problems that occur during manufacturing and commercialization, and acknowledge the fact that for the potential technologies which are at their early development stages, there is a lot to be figured out especially in the R&D stage.
At Tata Steel, pursuing research in advanced materials is an active process. The work in the area of Nanotechnology started almost a decade ago. The Company started the Graphene Initiative in 2016 with the opening of the Graphene Centre in Jamshedpur. The objective was to identify applications and establish successful upscaling models and discover potential markets.
Two Tata Steel Advanced Materials Research Centers have been established, one at Chennai in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IITM), and the other at Bengaluru, in collaboration with the Center for Nano and Soft Matter Sciences (CeNS). The objective of these centers is to work closely with academia and other centres of expertise to strengthen the portfolio of advanced materials research and its applications, including Graphene.
Tata Steel’s sustainable growth aspirations are driven by innovation, guided by values and supported by the efforts towards continuous improvements in the processes, building efficiencies and adding value to the products & solutions while meeting varied requirements.
Participants selected in phase #1 of ‘Tata Steel MaterialNEXT’ will be invited for one-on-one interaction with assigned mentors during a conference to be held on January 19, 2019. In the second phase, teams will be given eight weeks to work on their proposals and present their solutions in a competitive evaluation by panels of eminent judges on March 16, 2019. The top five teams selected at the end of phase two will move to the third and final phase – the grand finale that will be held on April 13, 2019.
The competition starts with registration wherein participants in teams of 2 to 3 must submit their proposals. These will be evaluated by the experts as per certain criteria.