Shushk Engineering started in July 2020, in the industrial suburb of Faridabad in the National Capital Region (NCR) of India. The immediate goal of the company was to leverage the industrial prowess of NCR and the engineering experience of the founders to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic. Even in the early days, the rapid spread of Covid, couple with the failure of traditional hygeine measures in containing it was pointing towards the virus being airborne. Thus, Shushk Engineering came out with its Kaksh line of Air Deviralizers which utilized UV-C (far Ultraviolet light) and propreitary catalysts to deactivate the viruses in the room air. 

The underlying reason for its efficacy is what drew the founders towards this solution. Most of UV-C light within the sunlight that hits the Earth is filtered out by the atmosphere before sunlight reaches on the ground. Thus most organisims on earth have not evolved any form of defense against these high energy UV-C rays, making it a powerful tool against even unknown viruses!

This has become the character of Shushk Engineering: problem solving with a blank sheet, working up to the solution on first principles.

The chart you see on the left is a scary one, especially if you're a resident of NCR. 9 of the 20 most polluted cities (air quality wise) in the world are within a 50 km radius of Shushk Engineering HQ at Faridabad.

For the team at Shushk, this was the natural next step in the waning days of the Pandemic. After 2 years of intense, first-principles research, Shushk Engineering launched its Zapper line of Precipitators in October, 2023. The technology developed in those two years is completely different from any filter based air purifiers. Electrostatic precipitaton is already used in Coal power plants to remove any suspended particulate matter (PM) in the exhaust gases produced after combustion. This long-proven technology was miniaturized and improved on at the Shushk workshop to create the Zapper reacten air is pushed through the reactor, more than 90% of the PM particles are trapped within the reactor. What's more is that the reactor continuously cleans itself, such that its performance doesn't drop even when thick smoke passes through it for hours on end!

Zapper marks a techtonic shift in the application of air purification in industry, in commercial sector and society at large. Large volumes of heavily polluted air (think pitch black smoke) can now be cleaned by relatively inexpensive, energy efficient and compact machines. Zapper marks another major step for Shushk Engineering in the field of air purification.

Canary came out of a need to precisely measure the performance of Zapper. Canary is an AQI monitor which measures PM 2.5 and PM 10 (PM is the same Particulate Matter discussed above) values and logs it on the website with graphs (see left). Although initially we only used it for logging how quickly Zapper reduced the PM values in our test space. But in 2021, governments in Delhi-NCR region made it mandatory to install AQI monitors at all construction sites bigger than 500 square yards. This meant that we had a new product vertical on our hands. Thus began our foray into sensor based products as well. We experimented with water level monitors, pollutant gas monitors and landed on our next major product:

Klydo! This is a spectrometer that can fit in a generously sized trouser pocket. Now, what need would one have of a spectrometer? None, really. You might not even know what that is (it measures the spectrum of light it recieves). But through our painstackingly developed algorithm, we convert the spectral signature of any object or surface you point towards into the following:

• CIE Lab values. This is how colour is measured and communicated by the scientific community worldwide. They do it by just 3 numbers for every colour the human eye can see: L* (how white is it), a* (how red/green is it) and b* (how yellow/blue is it).

• While that is very impressive, us normal people with normal IQs prefer to match colours with those beautiful colour brochures. Klydo gives you the closest Pantone shade match. Pantone is THE industry standard when it comes to colour library. Besides, we also show RAL and Asian Paints shade match, if the customer prefers those.

• Finally, we have a 'reference mode'. You store the master shade by scanning it or feeding its colour code. Then, whenever you scan another object, you get ΔE* value and Grayscale value. Textile industry knows how critical these values are in meeting customer expectations!