More BTRA patents in offing

The 60th Annual General Meeting of BTRA was held on 25 September 2014. Prem Malik, Chairman, BTRA Governing Council, chaired the meeting. Malik, in his speech, shared that operational income has gone up by 16 per cent during 2013-14. BTRA has filed two more patents: a process for manufacturing conducting polymer coated textile substrates and an apparatus to carry out the same, and a method and system for manufacturing multifunctional cotton fabric.

BTRA is in the process of filing patent for some of its work on plasma application in 2-3 countries abroad. BTRA scientists are working on plasma application has bagged an Innovation Award under the DST-Lockheed Martin India Innovation Growth Programme 2014.

In his speech, Malik concluded that BTRA research on fabric sensors is ready for commercialisation. Even Centre of Excellence for Geotech is continuing to serve the geosynthetic industry by way of testing, training and product development with pilot plant facilities. Now, BTRA is setting up a Geosynthetic Institute known as ´GSI-India´ soon for which an agreement is signed with Dr George Koerner of Geosynthetic Institute, Folsom, US.

BTRA continues to work in frontier areas of technology and will soon initiate a major research programme on electron beam radiation of textiles for innovative products for which the Ministry of Textiles has agreed to sponsor. Another project on´Development of Multi-functional Fabric Encapsulated with Nano TiO2-Ag´ based on nano technology has been submitted to Nano science group of the Department of Science & Technology. On the commercialisation of technology developed, BTRA entered into an agreement with CSIR-Tech for technology.