Akshat Jiwan Sharma

I had great fun connecting with representatives from the Tourism Authority of Thailand promoting Thailand as a destination to travellers in India. Nearly 2 million Indian travellers visited Thailand in 2024 making India one of the top outbound markets for Thailand.  Ms Pattaraanong Na Chiangmai , the Deputy Governor for International Marketing (Asia and South Pacific) communicated the decision of the tourism authority of Thailand to position their nation as a ‘premium’ travel destination shifting the focus away from mass tourism that has dominated the Thai travel scene.  With a focus on wellness , destination weddings and cultural activities it seems like TAT might succeed in its goal, especially as Thailand shares deep cultural bonds with India through Buddhism, through the Thai language itself which has flavors of Sanskrit and Pali and of course through the fun festival of Songkran which is very similar to the wildly popular holi celebrations in India. The growin...

23 March 2026  Over the last couple of days I had the pleasure of participating in two very important conferences, 'Path to Deployment for Long Duration Energy Storage’  by LDES council together with the International renewable energy agency and ’the future of hydrogen mobility’ by hydrogen europe.  Both the LDES council and Hydrogen Europe are working very hard to raise awareness among policy makers and investors about the importance of alternative sources of energy storage and their role in decarbonisation of the grid and industries.  For large scale deployment of Long Duration Energy storage technology new investment is critical but investors won't invest in a technology that does not provide a reliable ,safe and guaranteed path for a return.  During the webinar experts at IRENA,LDES and from regional markets in North America,Asia and Europe presented their views on how this chicken and egg problem could be resolved.  The main angle that the council has...

Transmission lines play a critical role in electrical infrastructure. They help actualise the single most important feature of electrical energy. The ability to transport it over large continental scale distances. In recent years there have been concerns about a shortage of copper to meet the demands of transmission lines but there are 2 counter arguments to that.  First the total known reserves of copper are around 1 billion tonnes while the annual production is merely 23M tonnes. For a 1000KM long HVDC link only about 30 thousand tonnes would be required. 20MT of copper would suffice to meet all of 3TW of power required globally with plenty left as a backup for future demand. And that's just copper, there is even more aluminium which is quite close to copper in conductivity and could easily fill in gaps left by the copper supply chain. If all else fails there is always steel. It has 50 times lower conductivity than copper but even then it's good at high voltages. There is an ...

17 March 2026 I thank Infineon technologies for organising the hotly anticipated, annual, wide band gap developer forum for a discussion on cutting edge research and latest developments related to SiC and GaN semiconductor devices.  Electrification is seen as one of the most effective ways of bringing down global greenhouse gas emissions and enabling transition to a green economy.  However, unlike carbon based energy sources electrical energy generation, transmission ,distribution and its final application is far more complicated than simple extract, transport and burn processes of fuels.  These require functional materials that have very specific properties which can be applied to a particular stage in electrical energy use. Magnets for energy generation, Electrical steel for voltage transformation,copper or Al for energy transmission and of course all sorts of resistors,inductors and capacitors for managing & manipulating the flow of energy.  Another complicati...

11 Mar 2026 Yesterday at the 60th Edition of Cobotalks organised by I-Hub Foundation for Cobotics Technology Innovation Hub of IIT Delhi, I had a chance to attend a talk on physical AI by Dr Santanu Chaudhary, Former Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Delhi. This talk came just weeks after the India AI impact summit but I was excited nonetheless to learn more about some of the academic aspects of AI.  Dr. Santanu emphasized that while chatbots have taken over the mindspace there is more to AI than just interactions with a server on the cloud. The chatbots represent a more general-purpose intelligence, they are quietly disrupting several industries in the ‘knowledge-work’ space but physical AI is narrow task specific intelligence that has applications in industrial automation and handling tasks that are either too dangerous for humans or too much of a chore.  Autonomous vehicles are a great example of physical AI. They have demonstrated that it is...

I thank the Indian ceramics society for hosting a Webinar Series titled "Global Connect: Ceramics & Beyond", featuring monthly online lectures by distinguished global experts in the field of ceramics and materials science. INCERS has provided researchers in the country a great platform to learn from and network with global experts in the field of ceramics.  It was a pleasure for me to attend the 11th lecture in this series on polymer derived ceramics as this is an area that I'm immensely interested in. Dr Günter Motz gave an hour long presentation comprehensively covering critical aspects of PDC technology from synthesis of polymers to their final processing as they are converted into hard ceramics.  PDCs have been applied in the biomedical,aerospace, electronics & coatings industry. Anywhere a combination of high strength,high temperature oxidation resistance & high hardness becomes important PDCs shine. The key advantage of PDC is  that they can be transform...