By Abigail Bassett
Aaron Birt always wanted to be an engineer. In high school, he was always more focused on math and science than other courses.
Ivan Clow
That disposition ran in the family. His uncle was an aeronautical engineer at Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, and Birt thought it was so cool that he got to work on secret projects and help train John Glenn.
While he credits his uncle with influencing his career choice, he counts his parents as having the bigger impact on his current work.
“My mom taught me how to talk to people and my dad taught me how to work hard. They also supplied me with an abundance of Legos,” he says. “They taught me it’s never the work of just one person, it’s always the family or the team. That is something that is central to my professional work today.”
Engineering a better future
As a cofounder of Kinetic Batteries and Solvus Global, perhaps Birt’s greatest strength is building the right team to affect global change. Together with his partners, the companies are developing processes that help make everything from recycling scrap to manufacturing batteries more efficient and less environmentally harmful.
Solvus Global began as what Birt calls a “consulting gig to pay the bills.”
“We started getting excited about creating a new home for engineers,” he says. “We wanted to make a place where they could hatch their great ideas.”
The idea is to take on promising development programs that began in universities, incubate them and then, once they are commercially ready, spin them out into full-fledged businesses.
Kinetic Batteries was the first proof of concept for Solvus Global. The company is working on a way to 3D print lithium-ion batteries on almost any surface.
Ivan Clow
The process leverages Birt’s knowledge of something called laser-assisted cold-spray technology to print a battery on anything from the inside of an electric motorcycle chassis to the interior of an airplane. Kinetic is working on trademarking their process as what they’ve named K-SEC, or kinetic spray electrode consolidation.
There’s still significant testing and research to be done to ensure that the batteries can hold up to temperature, capacity and lifecycle needs, and to determine if they’re economically feasible. But Birt hopes to have a licensing deal by 2020 so that the technology can be put to use by major consumer-facing manufacturers like carmakers.
The work has earned him a place on Fortune’s 30-under-30 list for Manufacturing and Industry, as well as a variety of accolades from his peers.
All about partnership
One of the major inflection points in Birt’s career happened when he met his two partners, Diran Apelian and Sean Kelly.
When Birt was a junior at Lafayette College, he landed an internship at a company that specialized in making building pipe connections. At the time, 3D printing was just starting to take off and he was working with engineers who tasked him with creating sand casting molds. It was through this work that he became excited about the material sciences.
One of the engineers told him about Apelian, who had been working at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
“When I met Diran for the first time, he went out of his way to introduce me to several other members of his team in an attempt to set up a graduate minor in business for me,” Birt says. “He treated me with tremendous respect despite my being a 21-year-old upstart with no experience or background in materials science.”
Birt credits Apelian with teaching him about more than just materials and engineering.
Randy Pekich
“I've learned, in my short time in business, that when you are building a team morals and values are paramount,” he says. “Diran and I are both passionate about people, technology, education, and making an impact. It's our vision for impactful innovation and a desire to improve the world around us that gives us a foundation to push the limits and realize these innovations.”
Apelian also serves as the connection point for their third partner, Sean Kent. Kent graduated a year after Birt and was also a former student of Apelian’s. They knew each other in grad school and became fast friends. Birt says he and Kent are perfect complements to one another.
“Where I tend to think in terms of the big picture with lots of little pieces, Sean is able to focus on the short-term tasks at hand in order to execute on a day-to-day basis,” he says. “We both share a passion for people – especially for giving people an environment in which they can truly thrive.”
A cornucopia of beneficial uses
The way Birt describes his work is more like a process of discovery than a set path. His focus in college and his PhD program was largely on cold-spray technologies. It wasn’t until he got deep into his studies that he realized the process offered a number of different ways to improve the world. Batteries was but one of those ways.
“Our work with batteries started as an intellectual curiosity and then we started doing some testing and research,” he say. “We came to discover that this could have a major impact on many businesses. That’s when we really started getting excited about the battery application.”
It doesn’t stop with batteries either, he says.
“Our 15-year plan is to mine asteroids. That is something that will be game-changing for the world. What that does to the global economy will be extremely important and Kinetic and Solvus would like to play a role in that.”
