Steag to Open Centre at Rajagiri for Students to Convert Ideas into Prototype

KOCHI:
A facility equipped with 3D printers, CNC routers, laser cutters and electronics and software will open this Friday at Rajagiri School of Engineering and Technology (RSET), enabling students to innovate based on the principle of ‘learning by doing’.

On January 24, RSET will open the Steag Centre for Smart City Technologies that aims to foster greater collaboration between academia and industry.
Aimed at enabling the students convert their ideas to prototypes in a space which they can call their own, the 4,000-sq-ft centre will be inaugurated by German Ambassador to India Walter J Lindner. The event will be attended by RSET Director Fr Mathew Vattathara, Steag Energy Services GmbH CEO Dr Ralf Schiele and the company’s India Chairman Dr Jacob T Verghese.

As a leading provider of services in power generation and transmission, Steag Energy Services India is the wholly-owned subsidiary of the 1937-founded Steag Energy Services GmbH. It is part of the Essen-based Steag group with an installed generating capacity of over 11000 MWs of coal, wind, solar, biogas, mine gas and geothermal plants. The company also owns and operates a 90-MW battery storage system.

With over 1,600 full-time employees in India and a portfolio of services covering Engineering, O&M and IT solutions, Steag counts several important public and private entities as their clients. The firm is also associated as the owner-engineer for the waste-to-energy plant coming up at Brahmapuram in Ernakulam district.

The facilities of the new centre at the RSET will be open to anyone who wants to develop an idea up to the prototype stage, if the team includes students of the Rajagiri group of institutions and the project is in the fields of energy, mobility and recycling of materials focused on the requirements of a Smart City.

The Centre intends to work closely with other stakeholders such as Cochin Refinery, FACT, Cochin Shipbuilding Yard, Kochi Metro, Kochi Water Metro, Kochi airport, Kochi Smart Mission Ltd (KSML), Fraunhofer Innovation Hub, the Kerala Start up Mission institutions like Makers Village, Fablabs, government institutions and think-tanks. This will help channel the talent of over 4,000 Rajagiri faculty and students at the graduate, post-graduate and doctoral levels in engineering, social sciences and business studies.

The upcoming centre is one of the several Indo-German initiatives in Kochi. Germany is assisting KSML’s capacity-building. Last year, Fraunhofer started an innovation hub in Kochi. Rajagiri, which hosts a bi-annual Indo German Summit to foster collaborative programs with German universities, is planning to have students from German Universities join students of Rajagiri in the training programs at the Centre for Smart City Technologies from 2021.