Showing posts with label Invention. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Invention. Show all posts

Sunday, June 21, 2020

Knowing Treelabs: Inventing the Inventors

I met Dr Dipankar of Treelabs on 13th Sept 2018 at his office cum residence. His work seems too good to be true.

Me and my son Ankit spend four and half hours with him knowing and seeing his work. He seems to have done ground breaking fundamental research in many many areas. He left IITB few years back. He is determined to make difference in the lives of lowest rung of people by creating Bell Labs of India and finding out enlightened inventors.

Many of his inventions are related to Electrical Power e.g. drastic reduction in energy consumption of an electrical induction motor, measuring energy usage of a machine in real time on mobile phone etc. Frankly I’m not qualified to assess or understand fully his inventions.

Short description of his work is given below.
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Dipankar did is B.Tech from IIT-Bombay in Electrical Engineering (‘84-‘88 batch). Subsequently, he did his Masters and PhD from Rice University (USA) in Physics. He did it in record time of 10 months. He enjoyed the rare privilege of working in both experimental and theoretical physics.

On the experimental side he worked on “cutting edge” technology areas such as Scanning Probe Microscopy, Fullerenes/Buckyballs (C60), Ultra-fast Femto-second Lasers etc.

He had been among the pioneers in the field of scanning probe microscopy, building systems from scratch when one did not have the luxury to purchase off-the-shelf systems.

Scanning probe microscopes may be considered the cutting edge in advanced mechanical control systems, with pico-meter level precision.

On the theoretical side Dipankar solved a 100-year old but largely contemporary problem, that of solving Maxwell’s equations exactly, analytically. This work allows electromagnetic calculations to be done in minutes on a personal computer, which would normally take weeks to compute on supercomputers.

Immediately on completion of his PhD, Dipankar returned to India, and started a private research Lab of his own, in India. He started by building scanning probe microscopes.

Dipankar’s work for more than one decade in India resulted in many significant inventions.

A prominent set of inventions are in the area of ‘energy-efficiency’ and have attracted keen attention from the pundits in the field.

Dipankar has published scientific papers in premier scientific journals such as Science, Physical Review Letters, Physical Review, etc.

Dipankar has also been associated, for the past more than twelve years with IIT-Bombay
as an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, and teaches a course called Electronics Design Lab, or EDL where students are urged to think on their own and design real working products, from ‘scratch’.

He also interacts with students in various IIM’s and other management institutions in the country.

At present Dipankar is focused on creating TREELabs, a ‘Linux’ like movement in the inventions domain, and has been mobilizing people and institutions to participate in various ways.

http://www.treelabs.org
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He is totally different from other inventors.

Top guys of leading corporations and government have met him and said he is sitting on multiple-billion dollar inventions.

He claims to explain concepts of mass, energy, laws of mechanics etc using two basic concepts of linearity and symmetry! He says even a child can understand it. He is writing a book about it

Amazing person. Not married though he had long relationship. Cooking own food. Almost in a garage type home-office setup with few dedicated young boys working with him. His colleague Cyril Mathew worked as a Phd student under Prof Dipankar at IIT Bombay.

He has certain basic principles:
  • No work for military
  • No nuclear energy
  • Teach people to fish instead of giving them fish.
  • Work should empower people of lowest strata. 
  • No bribe

Tesla wanted to buy his induction motor tech outright but he refused based on his certain principles.

He is working with Gandhi outfit at Wardha promoting "Nayi Taalim" (New Training) - where some bright young school students will be made factory owners and parents will be working in the factory!

Time spent with him - for us (me and my son Ankit) was a classroom learning of 4 hours and 30 mins!

When we left the place it left us wondering- can this be real!

He said when he was studying he had this Entrepreneurship bug bit him and he started earning from it more than his father, when he was just a student in a school.

Things started happening in his life and he never planned anything that has happened with him. On Scanning Tubular Microscope (STM) he happened to work with people who got Nobel prize later. He designed STM machine and gave rights to a friend from Italy because in India every top government official wanted to be compensated for assisting him.

He said he wasted six years at IITB. People who paid IITB for furthering his work never reached him. He got frustrated with IITB management and even mindset of students. So he left it. He didn’t take salary when he worked.

His monthly expense is Rs. 2,000 to 3,000/-

I forgot to mention he said he has designed a way to get about 4 to 5 litre of water overnight in a desert from an area of one square metre without using any energy.

Also, he could convert it to ice by spending about Rs.300 to 400 of energy.


He said energy efficiency of a ordinary ceiling fan is 1 to 2% if you measure the energy output of the air displaced and reduction in air temperature. One of the expert in aviation in airflow (PhD) did calculations and agreed on his view.


He showed a three phase induction motor run through his “box” on single phase 230 volt ac. at different speeds.


He showed a small size (easily portable) Welding Machine powered by single phase 230 volt ac power. He took two broken high speed steel  hacksaw blades. When connected the blade tips melted and got joined. One remarkable part of welding was that he held the blades with bare hand i.e., temperature increase of the blades was only at the tip where they got welded.

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Arc welding machine demo

"My Story Session" with Prof. Dipankar of TREELabs at TiE Pune.

https://youtu.be/3q1nzO5W5F0
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Ice maker demo at Tata Centre for Technology and Design of IIT Bombay.

https://youtu.be/-N5gTR1o_Zs
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Lampo - light source

Richard Stallman, founder of GNU foundation and considered to be the 'father' of the free software movement, witnessing the lampo and having discussions at Treelabs.

This innovation got second place at the IIT Bombay's 10 Great Ideas contest during its Golden Jubilee celebration.

https://youtu.be/j93NWOnqHGI

Covid Resource for Second Wave

Initial part of this blog has resources useful for all of India. Later part is dedicated to resources for Mumbai city.