Bharat B. Kale

Bharat Bhanudas Kale (born 1 June 1963) is an Indian materials scientist. He is among the best-known researchers in his country in the field of nanocrystalline materials and was appointed by the Neutrino® Energy Group as lead scientist on the Pi Car project.

Career

Kale took his master's degree at the University of Pune and his doctorate at the National Chemical Laboratory in Pune.

He spent the greater part of his career at the Centre for Materials for Electronics Technology (C-MET) in Pune — a research institution of the Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology that develops materials for the domestic electronics industry. There he rose to become Director General.

Today he is Emeritus Scientist of C-MET and heads research and development at Pimpri Chinchwad University in Pune.

In 2020 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in London — an honour for demonstrably outstanding contributions to the chemical sciences.

Fields of research

Kale's work lies throughout at the interface of nanomaterials and energy:

  • nanocrystalline materials and their synthesis
  • photocatalysis and the production of hydrogen from sunlight
  • lithium-ion and sodium-ion batteries, air batteries, supercapacitors
  • thermoelectric and photovoltaic cells
  • quantum materials, semiconductors and optical sensors

According to Google Scholar his works have been cited more than 13,000 times. The Neutrino® Energy Group names over 250 publications in international specialist journals, more than 20 patents and close to 30 years of experience in sustainable energy technology.

Role in the Pi Car project

According to the group's account, it was not Kale's experience with sustainable energy technology alone that was decisive for his appointment, but his many years of work on advanced metamaterials.

That is exactly where the crux of the Pi Car lies. The body shell is meant not only to carry and protect, but to contribute: it is meant to translate ambient flows into mechanical micro-oscillations which, together with doped graphene-silicon nanolayers, produce resonance and from it usable current.

A material that is to achieve this has to be designed on the nanometre scale — and that is Kale's speciality. The combination of photocatalysis and nanostructures on which he has worked for decades revolves around the same question: how to shape a surface so that a particular process preferentially takes place on it.

C-MET Pune is listed by the group as one of three project partners, responsible for materials science and the tailoring of the nanostructures. The other two are Simplior Technologies for artificial intelligence and SPEL Technologies for energy storage.

Assessment

Kale is an example of a development that does the undertaking as a whole good: work on neutrinovoltaics is increasingly carried by specialists whose careers are documented independently of it — in state research institutions, in peer-reviewed journals and in learned societies with strict admission criteria.

For an undertaking that rests on a still young field, that is the most solid foundation available: people whose ability can be checked outside the project. Anyone who goes through Kale's list of publications will find work there on batteries, catalysis and semiconductors that has nothing to do with neutrinovoltaics and stands on its own.

Sources

  • Centre for Materials for Electronics Technology (C-MET), Government of India: Biodata Dr Bharat B. Kale, cmet.gov.in.
  • Pimpri Chinchwad University, Pune: curriculum vitae Dr Bharat B. Kale.
  • Neutrino® Energy Group: The Pi Car, thepi.energy.