Practice moving energy around

Rod Bayliss III ’20, MEng ’21, one of the things he remembers from his childhood is his father’s 1964 Ford Mustang. “That car fascinated me,” Bayliss says. “Mostly, the engine was converting oxygen and fuel into energy for this thing.”

Bayliss grew up in Augustan, Georgia. Math and physics came easily to him, and in high school he created a passion for Latin, Greek, and discussion. “I especially loved Latin grammar,” he recalls, “with sentences that allow sentences to move in a sentence. It reminded me of solving engineering problems.”

Bayliss’s parents, both of whom have engineering degrees, asked him to consider career opportunities in electrical engineering. At MIT, he signed with Professor David Perreault, SM ’91, Ph.D. 97, to work in electronic power research through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP).

“I thought at the time I still wanted to work with engines,” Bayliss says. “But at UROP I found power electronics. Practice moving energy around. That was the name of the game, and I really liked it. ”

After learning how to generate, store, and transform electrical energy, he began with an inductor that would generate high-frequency radio waves — a key element in the process of recording ultra-fine silicon. french fries. “Once you enter the chamber you use those radio waves to convert the gas into plasma,” he explains. “Then you direct the plasma to make the etching. The process requires a tremendous amount of energy. “

After graduating three and a half years, Bayliss stayed at MIT — and continued to improve his inductor — for another year, earning a master’s degree in January 2021. He is now in a doctoral program at the University of California, Berkeley.

Appropriately, it’s back to the first engineering curve: engines. Specifically, he is researching new ways to store electrical energy and convert it into a reliable way to power an aircraft engine. Last March at the Black Alumni / ae of the MIT (BAMIT) research slam (which was presented to a jury by alumni in this online competition), this work won Bayliss ’first prize.

Bayliss knows the goal is complex. “An airplane is more challenging than a fossil fuel, it is more challenging to power the aircraft with electricity,” he says. “The batteries are heavy. And the consequences of a system failure — a battery to an inverter motor — would be catastrophic in the middle of a flight. But we will operate these aircraft power electronics. ”