Abhishek Bharne.
Across electric mobility, motorsport and industrial hardware, engineers are being asked to solve a version of the same problem: deliver more performance from less material, less space and less weight. Electric vehicles need higher torque out of smaller drive units. Motorsport teams want hydraulic systems that hold up under sustained G forces without adding mass. Combustion researchers are trying to make strategies like Homogeneous Charge Compression Ignition, or HCCI, stable enough to use, chasing diesel like efficiency with lower emissions. Even outside the automotive world, companies building outdoor and hospitality hardware are being pushed to cut material and manufacturing cost without giving up durability. It is not one industry's problem. It is showing up in most of them at once.
Much of the work of solving it falls to a generation of design engineers trained to move between disciplines rather than specialise narrowly in one, calculating loads by hand before committing to a material, testing components against the actual environment they will sit in rather than a generic spec, and treating manufacturability as part of the design brief rather than an afterthought. Abhishek Rajesh Bharne, who studied Motorsport Engineering at Oxford Brookes University, is one engineer whose project history maps closely onto that pattern, with work spanning electric mobility, motorsport, combustion research and commercial hardware over the past few years.
His contribution has largely taken the form of turning designs that looked workable on paper into ones that could be built, at a cost and within a timeframe that made sense. In electric mobility, that meant a worm gearbox built around a single stage worm gear capable of a 20:1 to 60:1 reduction ratio, sized to deliver high torque at low speed without the bulk of a multistage planetary system. He worked through the shaft shear stress, bearing loads and axial thrust by hand before selecting hardened EN8 steel and phosphor bronze for wear resistance, arriving at a 250 Nm unit with built in self-locking now suited to electric two wheelers and robotics.
In motorsport, his focus shifted to reliability under punishing conditions. An external gear hydraulic pump he designed for dry sump lubrication had to account for sustained G forces, vibration and temperature swings on top of standard fluid mechanics, and a through bolted housing with tangential port placement was used to reduce cavitation risk at high shaft speeds. His flow and efficiency calculations, around 74 litres per minute at 90 percent volumetric efficiency, were worked out before any part was manufactured, the kind of sequencing racing teams increasingly rely on to cut development time and cost.
His most academically demanding piece of work is a turbocharged V6 engine concept, designed independently to support a university research programme into HCCI, a combustion strategy widely seen as a potential bridge between conventional engines and full electrification. He adapted an inline four architecture into a symmetric V6 specifically to reduce cylinder to cylinder variation, the main source of instability in HCCI systems, pairing flat crown pistons, equal length intake runners and balanced exhaust routing to keep auto ignition timing predictable. More recently, at the hospitality technology company Caravelou, he carried the same reasoning into a very different setting, designing a universal pole clamp for an outdoor IoT charging hub that fits poles from 30mm to 170mm in diameter, using a slotted plate design and PPA plastic to cut material use by around 40 percent while holding up to UV and saltwater exposure.
Asked about where the field is heading, Bharne points to convergence rather than specialisation. As electrification matures and combustion research narrows in on strategies like HCCI, he expects demand to grow for engineers who can carry calculation discipline and manufacturing awareness across sectors rather than staying inside one, moving between electric drivetrains, racing hardware and commercial products as the problems themselves start to overlap. His own project history, spanning exactly that range, reads less like a set of separate exercises and more like a working answer to the question the wider industry is now asking.
Linked In - https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhishek-bharne/
