Bangalore: The students of the St. Joseph's College of Engineering in Sholinganallur on the outskirts of Chennai, Tamil Nadu have won recognition at the national level. St Joseph's College of Engineering has five of the 19 projects that were accepted and shortlisted this year for the Bachelors' Level Innovative Student Projects Award established by the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE), New Delhi. The selected projects were all conceived as part of the mandatory final year project work in engineering colleges and the students made a presentation about their ideas in Delhi. INAE shortlisted S Priyadarshini's project on the implementation of a Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) based load management system for educational institution. It was stated that if the idea took shape, 40 percent of energy consumed in colleges and schools could be saved. "This is a concept where the power load is managed through a centralized PLC system. It would enable automatic control of electrical switches in classrooms and laboratories in educational institutions. Based on a pre programmed time table that is fed into the computer system, lights and fans will automatically be switched off in a classroom when the students move out to attend laboratory sessions. When the student re-enter the classroom for the next period, the electricity supply will be switched on and the power load will be off in the laboratory," said Priyadarshini, who worked on the project with her classmate Aishwarya Vedham. C Srikanth and C Vinod Kumar came up with an idea to install a high performance radio frequency identification system to avoid accidents at unmanned railway crossings. "Our objective is to develop a fully controlled and automated railway level crossing gate using high performance Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) system. Whenever a train approaches a level crossing, the gate should close automatically and open after the train passes," explained Srikanth. Nelvin Johny and Abel K Mathew, two mechanical engineering students designed a rotary valve to operate the inlet and exhaust valve in a motorcycle engine to save fuel consumption. The other projects that were selected for the national event were cultivation of marine algae and production of phytochemicals conceived by Sanjay and a non-invasive infant monitoring system using sensors by Joannah Ranjini Gabriel, Pratheeba and Sharanya.