IIT Gandhinagar wins grant to develop indigenous cooling tech

IIT Gandhinagar research team won seed grant of Rs 20 lakh to develop India's first indigenous cooling tech for EVs, AI infrastructure, railways and high performance electronics.

This technology can address two major issues. One is cooling of the fast growing AI driven data where cooling is now a primary constraint. 

The other is concern is about electric vehicle battery thermal management, say sources from IIT Gandhinagar.

The grant

The researchers of IIT Gandhinagar got a grant of  ₹20 lakh seed grant at ‘MATRIx 2026’ (Materials Research, Innovation & Entrepreneurship Expo), organised by the Indian Institute of Metals (IIM), the professional body for metallurgists.

Industrial thermal management

This indigenous manufacturing technology could help address industrial thermal management through a new generation of liquid cold plates.

Titled ‘Advanced Chill Tech,’ this innovation rethinks how liquid cold plates are manufactured, creating an avenue for an affordable, scalable and sustainable innovation, say sources from IIT Gandhinagar.

Indian patent application

The research team has filed an Indian patent application, ‘A Friction Stir Channeled Cooling Plate,’ jointly with its industry partner, Epsilon Engineering Pvt. Ltd. The technology has also reached Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 7, with prototypes successfully validated in an operational environment.

The largest prototype can withstand pressures more than 35 bar (well above industry requirements), and has passed fatigue and tensile testing.

Lead of the project

Dr Amit Arora, Associate Professor in IITGN’s Department of Materials Engineering, together with Ms Prachi Sharma and Mr Rizwan Qureshi, final-year doctoral students in the department led the project. 

Internal channels and the difficulty

Liquid cold plates are metal components containing internal channels through which coolant flows to extract heat from high-power electronic systems, similar to a car radiator that removes heat from an engine.

They are widely used in battery thermal management systems, data centres, railways, power electronics, defence, aerospace and other applications where excessive heat can affect performance, safety and reliability.

The difficulty lies in forming the channels inside a solid plate. 

This is of extreme importance today, given the sudden surge in demand for data centres and their thermal management.

Making

Most commercial liquid cold plates are manufactured using vacuum brazing, a process that joins multiple metal components at high temperatures.

According to the research team, though this method is an industry staple, it is capital and energy-intensive.

Dr Amit Arora said Brazing’s success rate runs at only about 40 to 60 per cent, with a large fraction of plates being scrapped for hidden defects or leaks. 

With the cold plates being manufactured by fusing multiple joints, any potential leak is not a nuisance but an electrical and thermal hazard, he said.

Reliance 

Also, as there is a lack of indigenous infrastructure for manufacturing vacuum-brazed components, India continues to rely heavily on imported technologies for these products.

Overcoming the limitations

To overcome these limitations, they have developed a manufacturing approach based on ‘Friction Stir Channeling’ (FSC), said Dr Amit Arora.

Instead of joining multiple components, the process creates integrated internal cooling channels within a single metal plate using a rotating tool that plastically deforms the material without melting it, he said.

Liquid cold plate fabrication

The aim was to come up with an alternative manufacturing approach that can address the limitations of conventional liquid cold plate fabrication while making the technology more accessible for the Indian industry, said Prachi Sharma.

Milestone

Winning the ₹20 lakh seed grant at IIM Matrix 2026 is a proud milestone for our team, said Rizwan Qureshi.

It will enable us to bridge the gap between laboratory research and market deployment, helping us transform a promising research outcome into a viable technology venture, he said. 

The funding will support larger-scale testing, intellectual property development, product refinement, and commercialisation efforts, he said.

Potential

The research team believes there is good potential for the innovation to strengthen manufacturing ecosystem of India by paving way for domestic production of a critical engineering component which is now being sourced from outside India.

One of its application is in railways,  where liquid cold plates are used to cool high-power electronic systems (IGBTs) in modern high-speed trains and metro coaches. 

The IIT Gandhinagar team has developed and tested prototypes for high-speed rail applications.  

The technology is well-suited for EV battery thermal management, AI-driven data centres, GPU cooling, power electronics, defence and aerospace systems, and metallurgical industries, say IIT Gandhinagar researchers. 

By replacing a multi-step, energy-intensive manufacturing process with a single-step solid-state process, the technology reduces manufacturing time, energy consumption, material waste and carbon emissions while supporting the objectives of ‘Make in India’ and Atmanirbhar Bharat.

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