EPIRUS

Focused on using Directed Energy for military and more specifically counter UAS threats, I had never worked in a start up environment before. I quickly fell in love with the fast paced environment and the get it done mentality. The company had developed one MVP and were quickly working to make necessary improvements, build out more systems and see if their technology could be used for other purposes. One such idea that was give to me on my first day was to research and understand if the high amounts of power able to be generated while neutralizing drone threats could be turned and used to combat global warming by breaking down CO2. As such I spent the rest of my internship developing proof of concept, doing the necessary calculations to back up my predictions, leading design talks to the CEO, CTO and other executive members and eventually building an initial MVP. 

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While the team was super and supportive of me and definitely willing to answer any questions that I had during the process, there was always a lot of doubt around my ideas because there was not anyone who had done it before. I remember walking into my first design review and after talking for 10 minutes one of the engineers interrupted me and said "So you are basically building a bomb" (I was not) because he doubted the ability for the process to work. After running him through all of my calculations and research by the end of the meeting he was supportive of me building an initial MVP in the parking lot behind the office. This taught me the importance of being able to defend your design decisions and being able to communicate effectively and efficiently. 

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One of the biggest challenges I faced was finding resources to help inform my thinking and back up my idea, especially because there was no research that had been done on this specific idea. I quickly learned that while an exact solution might not exist there was lots of resources available for decomposing each part such as breaking down CO2 and lots of people at the company to talk to about the power generated from L-Bands. 

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For my artifact, during the summer internship I was able to file a preliminary patent for my work on this project and a little less than a year later the company filed the full patent. 

 

Marr, H.B., Bedingfield, M.B., Goehringer, A.I., Dower, W.G., Lee, J.J., Rau, L.G.,
Verstandig, G.L., “Systems and Methods for Decomposition of Molecules,” Unites States
Patent, No. 20230015528