Belgaum: In the State-level competition organized by the Karnataka State Council for Science and Technology (KSCST), Bangalore, the students of Maratha Mandal Engineering College (MMEC) won best project awards. KSCST invites student project proposals from all engineering colleges in the State for funding selected projects at the beginning of the eighth semester. The competition was held at P.E.S. Institute of Technology and Management, Shimoga, where selected projects were showcased for exhibition-cum-competition and judged by the faculty members from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, and the National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal. 'Sunflower Seed and Oil Extractor Machine' won the Outstanding Project of 2010-11 award. The Sunflower Seed and Oil Extractor Machine was an innovative machine from which the seeds could be extracted from dry sunflowers directly and the seeds could be separated from the husk without causing any damage to the seeds. Further, these seeds were supplied to the oil expeller unit of the machine where oil is extracted. Both the extraction of seeds and oil extraction from the sunflower seeds are accomplished by the same machine. This reduced the cost of labour, transportation and time consumed for accomplishing the tasks. In rural areas, many farmers extracted sunflower seeds from flowers manually, which was a time-consuming process. The Sunflower Seed and Oil Extractor Machine designed and fabricated by Rishi Ghodke, Sagar Bogar, Nilesh Jadhav, and Aslam Sanadi of Mechanical Engineering Department under the guidance of B.J. Patil would be useful to farmers engaged in sunflower oil extraction. Source: Hindu