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Tamil Nadu
Their product: Kongu Engineering College students explain the functioning of automatic gear transmission system. PERUNDURAI: Imagine riding a motorcycle where you do not have to shift gears by leg but at the touch of a button. Sounds interesting, right? Well, this is what J. Shanmugama Lakshmanan, S.Harihara Shankar, C. Venkatachalam and R. Hariramkumar have done in their ‘Button Gear Shifter’ project. The final year students of mechanical engineering from Kongu Engineering College have used two solenoids (electromagnets) to activate the gear lever. “At the touch of a button on handle bar, power from a vehicle’s battery activates either of the solenoids, which shift the gear,” says Mr. Shanmuga Lakshmanan. The solenoids are placed at the ends of the lever. (Solenoids, according to www.wikipedia.org, refers to a loop of wire, often wrapped around a metallic core, which produces a magnetic field when an electric current is passed through it.) The boys say unlike the automatic geared vehicles where decrease in mileage is a possibility, their attachment in no away affects a vehicle’s performance and costs only Rs. 1,000. Mr. Lakshmanan conceived of the idea after he noticed those graduating to geared vehicles and elderly struggling to ride a motorcycle, where both the hands and legs are engaged. “I noticed the problem in my father who found it difficult to adjust to a motorcycle. It was then that I hit upon the idea,” says the boy, who got the clue for executing it during his internship. “When I was working at a two-wheeler service station, I noticed the electric ignition system, where at the supply of power, a plunger with a gearwheel engages the flywheel to start the vehicle.” The boy then teamed up with his friends who worked on it for over 18 months. “It required a lot of time as we had very little knowledge of fabrication then,” says Mr. Harihara Shankar. The boys also had to take the help of the Department of Electrical Engineering to design a customised solenoid. Finally, after investing 18 months and a little over Rs. 3,000 the boys won the first prize at the ‘Freedom to Innovate’ competition, organised by Honeywell in Bangalore and a consolation prize at ‘My Idea Contest’, organised at IIT-Chennai. That apart, the project also fetched jobs for the boys. While two of them have got placed with an automobile company, the other two will shortly enter a software firm.
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