IIT Palakkad | Indian Institute of Technology Palakkad

About

The lab sits within the Global Sanitation Centre of Excellence (GSCOE) at IIT Palakkad (C06, Sahyadri Campus, Kanjikode West, Kerala), a centre of excellence initiated and facilitated through the Office of the Principal Scientific Advisor, Government of India, whose ongoing work covers new sanitation technologies and solutions for non-sewered systems in rural and underserved urban areas, alongside participation in national and international NSS networks. It also supports development, dissemination and advocacy for NSS policy adoption in India, runs community outreach with collaborators, and works with TECHIN on commercialising NSS technologies. iitpkdiitpkd

Analytical services. The lab offers testing of wastewater, biosolids and septage. The instrument list is comprehensive and maps closely onto the Chapter 8 method set: iitpkd

• Solids and physical: microbalance, TSS apparatus, hot air oven, muffle furnace, turbidity meter, jar test apparatus, moisture balance, flow meter
• Organics and nutrients: COD digestor, BOD analyser with incubator, TKN analyser, UV-Vis spectrophotometer, fat analyser
• Advanced/elemental: ICP-OES with MPS, CHNS-O analyser, bomb calorimeter, GC with FID, TCD and headspace sampler, FTIR, microwave digestion, TCLP apparatus
• Microbiology: biosafety class II cabinet, bacteriological incubator, colony counter, autoclave, optical microscope, ultra-low temperature freezer
• Environmental monitoring: stack monitoring equipment, noise meter, indoor air quality meters and particle size counter

Research areas. Next-generation sanitation technologies, resource recovery from sanitation, microbial fuel cells and energy recovery, constructed wetlands, biosolids reuse, and thermal technologies for sludge management. iitpkd

Engineering Field Testing Platform. An on-campus facility that assesses the suitability and technical viability of prefabricated onsite systems treating blackwater, greywater and urine with flush water from a student residence, generating user feedback and real-world performance data to refine NSS solutions. It can host several reinvented toilet technologies in parallel, has dedicated pipelines per stream, an elevated toilet facility for both front-end and back-end studies, and reuse routes for treated water in horticulture and flushing. iitpkdiitpkd

For the V&V purposes, the capability is clearly there — including the bomb calorimeter, ICP-OES and CHNS-O that several other partners had to work around. That strengthens the case for chasing the report rather than writing them off; it also makes them a plausible candidate for some of the remaining technical work if the submission does materialise.