Dr. P. A. Lakshminarayanan (born 1950) studied at Indian Institute of Technology Madras for his B. Tech, M.S. and Ph.D. degrees. He worked at Loughborough University of Technology and Kirloskar Oil Engines Ltd. for about five and twenty years, respectively, before moving to Ashok Leyland in 2002 to head the Engine R&D. From 2011 till 2019, he was the CTO, and the Technical Adviser at Simpson and Co. Ltd. Now, he is an adjunct professor at IIT Kanpur.
With his teams, he has developed more than eight diesel and CNG engine platforms and 150 engine types commercially successful for efficiency and cost effectiveness. Two engine designs received prizes from the Institute of Directors (India). Twelve ideas were patented during the development of engines over 40 years. He has authored 54 research papers in journals and conferences of international repute. Four of them received the prizes for integrity and quality of contents from the SAE (Arch Colwell Award), Combustion Society (India), AVL (Graz) and AVL (India) in 1983, 1993, 2005 and 2011, respectively. He has coauthored two books titled "Modeling Diesel Combustion" (Springer 2010) and "Critical Component Wear of Parts in heavy Duty Engines" (John Wiley 2011). He has coedited a handbook "Design and Development of Heavy Duty Diesel Engines" (Springer, 2020). Now, he is editing his fourth book "Thermal Management of Engines for Performance and Emissions" which is due in 2021. He is elected to the fellowships of SAE (2009), INAE (2013) and ISEES (2018).
Dr. Yogesh V. Aghav received B. E. and M. Tech. degrees from VIT Pune and IIT Madras, respectively. His Doctoral degree is from IIT Delhi for his research work on heat release in diesel engines. Currently, he is the associate vice president of the corporate Research and Engineering, Kirloskar Oil Engines Ltd., Pune, with responsibilities for the performance, emissions, NVH, and development of internal combustion engines running on diesel and alternative fuels like natural gas and biodiesel. For two years, he served FEV, Pune, and helped to found the organization. For the last 25 years, he has lead teams to develop many engines of swept volumes ranging from 300 c.c. to 32-liter applied to agriculture, off-highway, power generation, construction equipment, marine, and defense.