The Story

Power Innovations is a emergency power solutions company. Meaning they build backup power for facilities so they never go down. Their main products are battery cabinets. They also work as a military contractor through their sister company, and thus work on projects for the US Navy and Airforce.

My Part

It was my first internship and I was hired into the R&D department to develop their hydrogen fuel cell storage system (this was back when I was a Chemical Engineer). During my time in R&D I helped develope the Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) and the titanium exhaust system. As the summer progressed, other projects took precedence over R&D so I moved to product design.

There I helped model the Gateway Liberty Solar Generator. This was my first in depth experience in SOLIDWORKS. I used ISO and ASME standards to model everything (don’t worry it took me forever to figure things out and I had to remodel so many parts it wasn’t even funny). Afterwards, I stayed in production and designed polymer mounts for our battery cabinets on US naval ships. This helped them pass the vibrations testing administered by the Navy. I also designed dozens of brackets for the Airforce on their Poseidon P-8 trainer. Learned a lot about sheet metal and manufacturing processes including CNC, milling, latheing, etc.