Chemical Physics Seminar
A serial entrepreneur and inventor, Ferber has two billion dollar IPOs to his credit: the latest of which was in the electric vehicle space. He has over a decade of experience with pioneering development of advanced battery technology resulting in the Tesla Motors battery system, the battery system found in the BMW Mini-e, and has over 200 MWh of energy storage attributable directly to his more than a dozen patents and patents pending. An electrochemist, geneticist and battery systems engineer, Ferber was lured from graduate studies at Caltech to become the CTO and founding technologist of eToys, Inc. He is currently Founder and CEO of ElectronVault, Inc. and is a member of ACS, IEEE and SAE.
Linda is Founder & CEO of ElectronVault Energy Systems (Pty) Ltd., an infrastructure energy storage company headquartered in Johannesburg. At ElectronVault, she focuses on strategy and technology development, leading their push into grid-scale storage and remote power. She advocates systems thinking to solve the problems of energy security and sustainability. Her professional experience encompasses consulting to high tech manufacturing and state government and, in academia, genomics, seismology and paleomagnetics. Maepa is a serial entrepreneur who degreed at Caltech as a geobiologist focused on protein co-evolution with the Earth's early atmosphere while working in the Kirschvink Lab.
Recent battery failures in electric vehicles and aviation power systems point to a failure of both battery system design and application engineering rooted in fundamental misunderstandings of battery system components and processes such as how battery cells are manufactured, how battery systems are assembled, and when deployed, what happens dynamically during the use of the battery system at both the application (vehicle) and battery system level instantaneously and over time. This talk will stress the importance of focusing on energy storage systems so that they are evaluated as systems rather than a collection of components with known and unknown behaviors. If you are interested in electrochemistry, battery systems engineering, systems science, systems engineering, reliability, manufacturing, aviation, or electric vehicles —you won't want to miss this!!!