Mangaluru: Malavika Vasishta Bagepalli and her research team from Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA made it into the Guinness World Record by designing a ceramic-based mechanical pump capable of containing and circulating liquid tin at a temperature range between 1,200 °C and 1,400 °C tested for over 72 hours. Malavika is an alumnus of Manipal University’s unique engineering programme offered by International Center of Applied Sciences (ICAS). She belongs to Mechanical Engineering Batch of 2010-12.

Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA is ranked 71 in QS World University Rankings 2017. Director, Dr Radhakrishna S Aithal said that Malavika was a top performing student at ICAS with a CGPA of 3.29 out of 4. After completion of two years in Manipal she got transferred to the prestigious Ohio State University, USA under the Twinning Engineering Programme. Later, she joined Georgia Institute of Technology, USA as Research Assistant. She is the daughter of B N Mohan, a businessman and Malathi Mohan from Hyderabad.

The extremely happy director of ICAS said, “The whole ICAS family is glad and proud of its alumnus, Malavika, for her outstanding research accomplishment. While wishing her more such laurels to follow, I am sure it would give a lot of motivation and inspiration to all ICAS students pursuing the International Transfer Programme in Engineering.”

The guide for the project is Prof. Dr. Asegun Henry and the others in the team include; Caleb Amy, Diane England and Daniel Budenstein. The demonstration for the record was held on January 23, 2017 at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA. The time taken to complete the project is two years and five months. The research group’s pump is unique as they use ceramic instead of metal, an inorganic, non-metallic material that has a brittle nature.

The research group overcame this challenge with careful engineering. The ceramic pump is directly exposed to the heated liquid tin, thus is able to operate at extremely high temperature, unlike other pumps which often require a cooling system to perform.