Akhlakh Ansari’s Emergency Battery Recovery Device for Electric Vehicles at Parul University

Electric vehicles are arriving on Indian roads faster than the charging network that supports them. A team of automobile engineering students at Parul University set out to help a driver who runs out of charge far from a station, and their device has travelled from a workshop table to a published patent application.

It is called the Adaptive Emergency Battery Recovery Device for Electric Vehicles. Shown and selected at Tech Expo 2026, it was filed on 26 June 2026 under application 202621079184 A, with Parul University as applicant, and published on 14 August 2026. Mo Akhlakh Husain Ansari, from Bharuch, is listed first among the inventors. He completed his B.Tech in Automobile Engineering at Parul University and now works at Tata Motors as a Quality Assurance Engineer.

The device was the team’s third direction in a year:

• A two-wheeler running on petrol and CNG, dropped once they found Bajaj had already launched one
• A hydraulic hybrid system for heavy vehicles, dropped as too complex
• The EV battery area, chosen because the market is rising but charging infrastructure is thin

The idea was grounded in an everyday fact: on the road from Vadodara to Parul University there is no charging station at all, and around ten EV seminars they attended all named the same problem.

The students built a small unit that charges a high voltage battery from a low voltage one, reversing the normal flow in a vehicle. That reverse arrangement is the device’s main feature. In plain terms, it is a power bank for electric vehicles, small enough to fit in the boot of a car or the trunk of a two-wheeler.

It does more than charge. It shows how much charge the vehicle needs and the nearest station, and tops up only what is required to get there. By the team’s testing, the maximum charge delivered is about 30 per cent, which for a 120 kilometre vehicle is roughly 40 kilometres, from half an hour to forty minutes of charging. It can also top up a resting vehicle from 60 or 70 per cent back towards full.

The central component was a DC-DC booster converter, which moves power from the low voltage system to the high voltage one. Most of the team’s failures came from it.

By calculation they needed a 1500 kilowatt converter. A miscalculation led them to buy 150 kilowatt units instead, three of them, far below what was needed, and under the full load the converter burst, even after adding a transformer and capacitor to protect it. The wires were a second problem: too thin for the current, so they moved to thicker 4 to 5 millimetre wire. With the correct converter and a change to its current and voltage settings, which the student compares to turning a volume dial up, they reached the level they needed. The lesson, in his words, was that low voltage is forgiving but high voltage needs protective measures.

The work was divided among four members. Aatir Shaikh handled the research-paper work and project details, while Akhlakh set the problem statement and led the research, design and implementation. Rehan Raza and Deshik Choudary were also on the team.

Before any physical testing, the team ran ANSYS and MATLAB simulations for the electrical components, taking more than 100 trials to reach the required figures. Mentors Omkamal Vashi and Dr. Prathamesh Potdar guided the work. About 90 per cent of the problems showed up in the software model before anything was built physically.

The project drew interest from PIERC, which invited the team to a startup programme, and from companies including Ather and Hexavir, a Vadodara firm whose engineers were keen to help on safety. The incubation link runs through the Parul Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research Centre (PIERC).

The prototype cost around Rs 2,000 to 2,500 at actual prices, though failures pushed total spending to about Rs 15,000. The team sees rural areas, where charging infrastructure is scarcest, as where the device could matter most, and a future in collaboration with a company for manufacturing.

SOURCE AND CONTEXT.  This article is based on an interview with Mo Akhlakh Husain Ansari and the published patent application. The application is published, not granted. Performance figures and costs are the team’s own testing and estimates. LinkedIn profiles are linked with tracking parameters removed; one inventor profile link may be incomplete and should be verified.

Students with an engineering or sustainability idea can explore the campus innovation ecosystem.

PIERC, innovation and incubation: pierc.org

Lakshya 2047, Centre for Future Skills: paruluniversity.ac.in/academics/lakshya-2047

Faculty of Engineering and Technology: paruluniversity.ac.in/faculty/engineering-technology

• Mo Akhlakh Husain Ansari Lead inventor; now QA Engineer at Tata Motors
• Aatir Shaikh Team member, research and documentation
• Rehan Raza Team member
• Deshik Choudary Team member
• Omkamal Vashi Faculty mentor
• Dr. Prathamesh Potdar Faculty mentor
• Parul University Named applicant on the patent application