IIT Delhi launches platform for researchers from across India to access Central Research Facility

Researchers from across the country will now be able to access facilities available at IIT Delhis state-of-the-art Central Research Facility CRF as the institute has developed a platform for the purpose, officials said.The platform was launched on Tuesday.Rs 500 crore have been either spent or committed by IIT Delhi to establish various high-end facilities at the CRF.

Researchers from across the country will now be able to access facilities available at IIT Delhi's state-of-the-art Central Research Facility (CRF) as the institute has developed a platform for the purpose, officials said.

The platform was launched on Tuesday.

''Rs 500 crore have been either spent or committed by IIT Delhi to establish various high-end facilities at the CRF. The main sources of funding include the IoE grant, special MoE grant, IIT Delhi grant through Industrial Research and Development, DST’s Sophisticated Analytical and Technical Help Institutes (SATHI) project, HEFA loan etc.

''Today, we have over 50 different facilities, owned or adopted by the CRF, which are already available to the users. This number is likely to get doubled in the next two years,'' said V Ramgopal Rao, Director, IIT Delhi.

Using the platform, anyone from across India can create a user account, log in to the CRF and book an instrument online (https://crf.iitd.ac.in/) for research work, he said.

''With this step, all facilities of the CRF on the institute’s main campus in New Delhi as well as in Haryana's Sonipat are now available for researchers from across the country,'' Rao said.

In an effort to boost the research ecosystem at IIT Delhi, the Central Research Facility (CRF) was established in 2011 where all the central facilities were brought under a single umbrella.

''Some of the most modern equipment like physical property measurement system, X-ray photoemission spectrometer, high resolution transmission electron microscope, molecular beam epitaxy, universal testing machine, electron paramagnetic resonance etc are now housed in Sonipat and many more have been planned for the upcoming second building,” said Pankaj Srivastava, head of the Central Research Facility, IIT Delhi.