Developing a Make-in-India cooling technology for EVs, AI infrastructure, railways, and high-performance electronics

A research team from the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (IITGN) has won a ₹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, for developing an indigenous manufacturing technology that could help address industrial thermal management through a new generation of liquid cold plates. Their innovation, the ‘Advanced Chill Tech,’ rethinks how liquid cold plates are manufactured currently, creating an avenue for an innovation that is affordable, scalable, and sustainable. 

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.

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. “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,” says Prof Amit Arora, Associate Professor at IITGN’s Department of Materials Engineering, who leads the Advanced Materials Processing Research Group (AMPRG). “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 the lack of indigenous infrastructure for manufacturing vacuum-brazed components, India continues to rely heavily on imported technologies for these products.

To overcome these limitations, the IITGN team has developed a manufacturing approach based on Friction Stir Channelling (FSC). 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. The research group at IITGN has worked on friction-stir-based manufacturing processes for the past decade to understand the FSC process and develop tools to control the channel geometry and dimensions. Earlier studies demonstrated the feasibility of fabricating internal mini-channels, while the present work advances the technology to manufacture macro-channel liquid cold plates suitable for industrial applications. What started as a purely scientific inquiry into the formation of channels using FSC has culminated in a product that is the need of the hour and completely indigenous. The group today has the capability to design cooling channels suitable for any heat-load. The result is a leak-proof cold plate with improved structural integrity, which, the team says, also reduces manufacturing time, energy consumption, and material waste.

“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,” said Ms Prachi Sharma, a final year doctoral student at IITGN. She, along with Mr Rizwan Qureshi and Prof Arora, formed the three-member team that pitched this technology at the IIM MATRIx 2026. 

Ms Sharma’s role focused on optimising the cooling channel geometry through thermal simulations to meet industrial performance requirements. She stated that translating those designs into manufacturable products while maintaining thermal performance was one of the key challenges during development. Mr Qureshi, who led the manufacturing process development, added, “Scaling the process from laboratory-scale channels to industrial-scale cooling plates required extensive optimisation of tool design and process parameters. Successfully demonstrating repeatable manufacturing and validating the prototypes with industry partners gave us the confidence to move towards commercialisation.”

The team has reached Technology Readiness Level 7, a prototype validated in an operational environment. The largest prototype they built measures 570 × 460 × 23 mm, with 13 × 8 mm double-entry-exit channels. The team reports its plates are 100 per cent leakproof, can withstand pressures more than 35 bar (well above industry requirements), and have passed fatigue and tensile testing. Along with their industry partner, Epsilon Engineering Pvt Ltd , the team filed a patent application, “A Friction Stir Channeled Cooling Plate” (Indian Patent application no. 202521003811), on 16 January 2025.

Beyond its technical advantages, the researchers believe the innovation has the potential to strengthen India's manufacturing ecosystem by enabling the domestic production of a critical engineering component currently sourced largely from imports. The team links the work to two fast-growing pressures: the rise of AI-driven data centres in India, where cooling is now a primary constraint, and safety concerns around electric-vehicle battery thermal management. 

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. In addition, 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. 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 through domestic manufacturing capabilities.

“Winning the ₹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,” said Mr Qureshi. The funding will support larger-scale testing, intellectual property development, product refinement, and commercialisation efforts.

Other related information:

Filed Patent: Sharma P., Qureshi M.R.A., Arora A., Gupte N., Sampat J., A Friction Stir Channeled Cooling Plate- 16th January 2025 (PAN - 202521003811) Indian Patent

Publications upon which the technology was developed:

• Patel, S., Kumar, R., Mishra, S. et al. Friction Stir Channeling Tool Design for Better Material Flow and Channel Strength. J. of Materi Eng and Perform 34, 19616–19629 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11665-024-10597-1 

• Patel, S.; Arora, A. Friction Stir Channeling in Heat Sink Applications: Innovative Manufacturing Approaches and Performance Evaluation. Machines 2024, 12, 494. https://doi.org/10.3390/machines12070494

• Pandya S. and Arora A., Material flow and channel geometry evolution during friction stir channeling process – Impact of tool geometry and process parameters, Journal of Manufacturing Processes, 2023, 10.1016/j.jmapro.2023.02.066 

• Pandya S., Mishra R. S., Arora A., Channel formation during friction stir channeling process — A material flow study using X-Ray micro-computed tomography and optical microscopy, Journal of Manufacturing Processes, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmapro.2019.03.021