Technical

Batteries and aircraft are not normally two words you hear together often. There is a good reason for this, and it's called Gravity.

Volocopter is one of the OG startups in Germany, that is making an electric vertical take off and landing aircraft for the masses.

I was fortunate enough to work with some of the world's best minds in aerospace and battery tech.

Together, we solved many challenging problems - Thermal runaway of passively cooled batteries, vibration behavior of massive aircraft equipment, and impact or crash behavior of batteries during drop scenarios.

I feel truly honored to have contributed to or led on many of these interesting problems.

Traditional cars are heavy. No shit! Electric cars are even heavier.

In the heart of Munich lies a small company who are enthusiastic about making cars lighter, and the whole process more sustainable.

Sometimes the endeavor appears too idealistic, as composite materials are more expensive and the manufacturing processes behind them are not always scalable.

But when I was working at Forward Engineering, I was often surprised by my innovative colleagues, who successfully made many cars lighter, through the clever use of the multi-material approach for all kinds of car systems - battery pack housings, body-in-whites, car body, etc

Car crashes, or how to avoid them, composite materials in battery packs, material selection for different requirements, i learnt these and many skills there.

It is impossible to feed the human population without wheat and potatoes. Modern human civilization is impossible to build without concrete and steel.

There was no threat to German civilization when one of their leading Steel manufacturers started losing chunks of graphite electrodes in their electric furnaces. But it was still a threat to the bank balances of the shareholders.

I was working in the central innovation and reaearch department of SGL Carbon, and we found out that the fracture strength of the electrodes was a culprit behind the near bankruptcy of the shareholders:)

We achieved these results through a series of carefully designed material testing campaigns and mathematical modeling of the electric arc furnace phenomena (Coupled electric-thermal and mechanical simulations, to be exact)

Pakistan's space program is decades behind many countries. I am still grateful to it, though, as it introduced me to the difficulties of Rocket science and engineering.

We were trying to reproduce publicly available designs of legacy NASA technology. The technical challenges of extreme G-forces, mass constraints, and limitations due to work and the political culture of an organisation made me a better engineer.

It made me realize the importance of understanding Physics and human nature.