RESEARCH:

The Centre for the Environment is engaged in building up fundamental and applied research on environmental sciences and technologies encompassing a wide spectrum of interests. It strikes a balance between experimental, computational, and theoretical approaches to research problems. It addresses current problems and generates new knowledge for dealing with the problems of the future. External research project grants helps in developing in-depth scientific understanding in parallel with engineering solutions for control, remediation or environmental management.

Faculty members are generally assigned to the Centre on time share basis, except the Head of the Centre. The Centre draws its strength from the faculty members across the Institute having a common research interest in various key environmental issues. By connecting people from different disciplines, the Center for the Environment seeks to raise the quality of research in response to various environmental challenges. The research interests of different research groups, including the faculty members and graduate students span most areas of interdisciplinary research like, Biochemical engineering, Water and Wastewater treatment, Environmental bio-remediation, Air-pollution and Dispersion modeling, Green chemistry, Environmental Design and Stochastic modeling etc.

Current research activities in the Centre:

• Biochemical: Production of industrially important enzyme from novel bacterial strain and use in sewage sludge digestion, slaughter house waste digestion and burnt-on protein residue removal from solid surface.
• Wastewater treatment: Removal of various inorganic and organic pollutants viz. heavy metals, dyes, phenolic compounds etc. from industrial effluents. Both, biological and chemical approaches are being studied to achieve the maximum outcome.
• Green Chemistry: Synthesis, structure analysis and reactivity through newer reagents and methodologies.
• Theoretical simulation and modeling: Simulation of pollutant dispersion at traffic intersection by quantification of the total amount of pollutant emitted at the site from the vehicles (source) by using traffic and emission model. With the help of computational fluid dynamics, dispersion of pollutant studies are extensively being carried out to predict the concentration of pollutant by varying all of the three major factors (the geometry near by buildings, size of the vehicle, geometry of the road and intersection, traffic fleet speed, emission rate etc.) affecting it.