KANPUR: A team of postgraduate students of Aerospace department of IIT-Kanpur have been successful in developing a prototype of an 'unmanned helicopter' named " Vibhram " which can fly continuously for 24 hours while carrying a payload of 80 kg. The novel design of this helicopter helped the students bag the third place in the graduate category of 34th Annual Student Design Competition organized by the American Helicopter Society (AHS). IIT-Kanpur students beat teams from University of Liverpool, a second team from Georgia Tech, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (China) and some other prestigious institutions of world fame.Meet Karthik S. (Team leader, MTech), Rahul Ramanujam (Team technical leader, PhD), Ramdas (PhD), Diksha Aggarwal (MTech), Sakshi Gupta (MTech), Avinash Shet (MTech), Vishesh Kumar Singh (MTech), Naba Kishore Routray (MTech) who developed 'Vibhram' helicopter under the guidance of Assistant Professor Abhishek of Aerospace engineering department and Prof C. Venkatesan (Emeritus Fellow Professor in Aerospace Department.Talking to TOI, Assistant Prof Abhishek said, "The design of Vibhram is very innovative. It has novel dissimilar coaxial rotor concept which was conceived for this competition by PhD student Rahul Ramanujam (a patent has already been filed on this concept). This rotor concept has been predicted to be more efficient than any existing helicopter concept such as conventional (single main rotor and tail rotor) and regular coaxial helicopters by 15-30%. This revolutionary new design is expected to have a strong impact on the future of helicopter technology. A research paper on the design authored by Rahul would be presented in September at European Rotorcraft Forum in Milan, Italy."He said that such a type of a helicopter design does not exist anywhere in the world and its prototype has been developed by the students in only six months starting in January this year. "We were required to submit a 100 page report, an executive summary of the project and a video of the operational helicopter which we had provided to AHS for taking part in the competition. The hardwork by the students bore fruits and they won the third prize", he added.He further mentioned that this is for the first time in 34 years that a team from Asia has finished on the podium of this competition in the graduate category."The objective of this year's competition was to carry out conceptual system level design of an unmanned helicopter that can fly continuously for 24 hours while carrying a payload of 80 kg", he said.The entire design work was carried out as part of AE 660: Preliminary Design of Helicopter course taught by Assistant Professor Abhishek in the previous semester. Professor C. Venkatesan gave his guidance to the team.The professor said that he and his team of students are now working on scaling up the version of this helicopter.