“Our need will be the real creator.” - Plato, The Republic. “Things are only impossible until they’re not.” – Captain Picard
Making Impactful Innovations has been the DNA of Pluss Advanced Technologies Ltd. since its inception as Pluss Polymers Pvt. Ltd., when in 1994, the founders Mr. Devendra Jain and Mr. Anil Mehta launched the country’s first natively manufactured specialty polymer additives.
The journey of CREST is a story of vision, perseverance, and innovation that fills us with pride. Rooted in the founders' deep expertise in polymer technology, Pluss Advanced Technologies began by developing indigenous products that empowered domestic manufacturers to reduce reliance on costly imports.
Self-reliance in technology and a commitment to nation-building innovations have been the bedrock of Pluss' growth, culminating in the establishment of CREST in 2021. The Centre for Research in Energy Science & Technology was born from the ambition to become a globally renowned research facility, driving India's sustainability revolution.
Mr. Jain from 1998 and Mr. Mehta conducting on the job training in 2008
( Centre for Research in Energy Science & Technology )
Recognizing the vast potential of thermal energy storage, Pluss spent years spreading awareness and engineering solutions for customers. This passion led to development of a range of over 40 unique phase change materials (PCMs) branded as savE® each having the potential to store thermal energy and save energy. The materials potential offered a promise to deliver efficiency, flexibility and resilience by enabling to decouple time of energy generation and time of use of energy at any desired temperature.
Our team of business innovation and R&D pursued markets and problem statements wherein these materials would later go on to make impact to address climate change, sustainability and energy efficiency. Constant innovation led to uncovering new applications in existing products and several new end products and brands like Aagun®, PronGo®, MiraCradle®, thermoTabactiv, Himacool™, MassEffekt™ and Celsure®. In an industry often wary of R&D investments, Pluss’ fearless ventures into new frontiers garnered numerous accolades, highlighting the company's innovative spirit.
CREST, encompassing Pluss' research, development, and engineering departments, is the core of the company’s technological advancements in polymers, PCMs, and thermal energy storage. Beyond product development, CREST excels in commercial scale-up, process enhancement, technical troubleshooting, and consultancy. Its diverse team of researchers and engineers, equipped with state-of-the-art labs, supports a wide range of technical proficiencies.
CREST extensively engages in collaborative projects and has bagged numerous research grants from national and international funding agencies. These include several projects of social and commercial impact, some of which are listed below.
A strong sense of social responsibility, combined with a drive to tackle challenging, familiar problems of India and similar countries propels CREST to develop easily adaptable, often retrofittable technologies and products for use in frugal frameworks. and our current efforts to develop battery cooling solutions for the EV industry, cooling jackets for delivery personnel, heat batteries and recyclable vaccine carriers bear testament to our efforts towards making in India making India self-reliant.
In 2016, CREST was funded by the DST to develop a PCM integrated solar powered space heating system (2016), where a thermal energy storage system would be employed to store solar energy and release it during nighttime to warm residential spaces in frigid regions of Leh and Ladakh.
In 2020, UNIDO provided grants to develop a similar technology, where the setup could provide thermal comfort even in absence of solar energy
IFC collaborated with CREST in 2023 in Nigeria and Latin America to develop a series of solar powered cold rooms and cold-transport trucks as per local requirements, for cold chains logistics catering to the dairy industry.
Between 2022-24, under the aegis of Horizon Europe, Pluss led a multi-partner consortium to develop a novel class of bio-sourced PCMs between 40 C and 60 C. The organic PCMs are derived from the animal and plant rejects from various food processing industries, to improve sustainable business practices in the food-energy-water nexus.
In 2023, Pluss collaborated with E-Renova to demonstrate an application of PCM buffers in improving the efficiency and thermal efficacy of residential heat pumps to be employed as a source of hot water for European households.
A collaboration with Shell India was instrumental in development of PCM based reefer trucks, with a focus on decarbonization as per the ESG goals of Shell. The project raised awareness of environment friendly solutions to the logistics, OEM and private reefer truck owners.
In 2021, Pluss, under the guidance of GITA (DST), participated in a three-year India-Sweden Collaborative Industrial Research and Development Program, where we collaborated with a Swedish firm to develop advanced PCMs and expand the thermal range of PCM offerings to 2 C to 8 C (for pharmaceutical transport applications) and 140 C to 200 C (for solar energy storage, waste heat recovery and combined heat and power generation).
Since the advent of the COVID pandemic, CREST has also collaborated with various organizations to expand its vaccine shipper portfolio and develop freeze-free vaccine carriers (United Way of Bengaluru), leak proof PCMs for an alternate freeze-free vaccine shipper (Global Health Labs) and for production scale up of the product (C-Camp).
From 2012 to 2017, Pluss was one of the many industry partners in the U.S.-India Joint Center for Building Energy Research & Development (CBERD), which was facilitated by CEPT University in India and UC Berkley in US, in partnership with Partnership to Advance Clean Energy (PACE). In this collaboration, Pluss contributed extensively to research and development of PCMs that can be incorporated in building envelops, as well as devising and funding various validation and monitoring studies of PCM containing envelops and their impact in energy savings in the tropical climate of India.
In collaboration with Dr. Niranjan Thomas and the department of Neonatology at CMC Vellore, Pluss developed the world’s first commercial, electricity free medical device to aid in treatment of neonatal asphyxia in infants. Given that the disease is more severe in underdeveloped countries and low-resource settings, which also find it harder to avail the more expensive western technologies of thermal conditioning, the impact of this device was immediate, and today, thousands of hospitals, dispensaries and healthcare facilities in low resource settings of Brazil, East Africa, India and Thailand among others employ this device to battle the disease and spread awareness about infant mortality rates in the global south.
© 2024. All Rights Reserved.