A research team of the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar (IITGN), has won a seed grant to develop India’s first indigenous cooling tech for electric vehicles (EVs), AI infrastructure, railways and high-performance electronics.
This technology will address cooling of the fast-growing AI-driven data centres in India, where cooling is now a primary constraint and safety concerns around electric-vehicle battery thermal management.
The researchers won a Rs 20 lakh seed grant at ‘MATRIx 2026’ (Materials Research, Innovation & Entrepreneurship Expo), organised by the Indian Institute of Metals (IIM), a professional body for metallurgists.
This indigenous manufacturing technology could help address industrial thermal management through a new generation of liquid cold plates.
The research team has filed an Indian patent application, ‘A Friction Stir Channelled Cooling Plate’, jointly with its industry partner, Epsilon Engineering Pvt. Ltd.
This technology has also reached Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 7, with prototypes successfully validated in an operational environment. The largest prototype can withstand pressures of more than 35 bar (well above industry requirements) and has passed the fatigue and tensile testing.
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.
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.
Elaborating about this technical issue, Dr Amit Arora, Associate Professor, Department of Materials Engineering, IIT Gandhinagar, 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.”
Additionally, due to lack of indigenous infrastructure for manufacturing vacuum-brazed components, India continues to rely heavily on imported technologies for these products.
Prachi Sharma, a final year doctoral student at IITGN, added, “Our objective was to develop an alternative manufacturing approach that addresses the limitations of conventional liquid cold plate fabrication while making the technology more accessible for the Indian industry.”
Rizwan Qureshi, who led the manufacturing process development, added, “Winning the Rs 20 lakh seed grant at IIM Matrix 2026 is a proud milestone for our team. 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. The funding will support larger-scale testing, intellectual property development, product refinement and commercialisation efforts.”
Beyond its technical advantages, the researchers believe that innovation has the potential to strengthen India’s manufacturing ecosystem by enabling domestic production of a critical engineering component, currently sourced largely from imports.
One of its immediate applications 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 IITGN team has developed and tested prototypes for high-speed rail applications.
