Originally published in Research Frontiers, Spring 2011
“It’s kind of a Cinderella story,” said Sharmilla Mounce, business operations manager for Arkansas Power Electronics International, Inc. In 2002 she and Alex Lostetter, chief executive officer of the company, worked for free for a year and maxed out their credit cards to start the company with former colleague Jerry Hornberger. Today the company has 30 employees and $3 million in revenue, but for a short time it looked as if the company would go nowhere at all. Grant money appeared just a week before Lostetter left for a paying job.
“We all wanted to be in Arkansas, but there aren’t a lot of high-tech jobs here,” Mounce said.
The company grew by capitalizing on technology to make things smaller – in this case power modules used in vehicles, geological exploration and the aerospace industry. To shrink the size of such devices, company scientists have focused on silicon carbide. Silicon carbide can operate at temperatures up to 600 degrees Celsius, unlike other currently used materials, which operate at about 125 degrees Celsius.
“If you can have electronics operate at higher temperatures, you need less of a cooling system,” Mounce said.
With their first grant in hand, the engineers took the unusual step of creating a motor drive from scratch to demonstrate that their concept would work.
“We grew everything from the ground up, from the sweat that people put into the company,” said Lostetter, and the work paid off. They kept that first motor drive as a reminder of how they started. It has a place in the same room with the R&D 100 magazine’s award for their work on a state-of-the-art power module.
A joint development between APEI, the university, Rohm Company LTD., and Sandia National Laboratory, the APEI power module is the world’s first commercial high-temperature silicon carbide-based power electronics module. With applications in hybrid and electric vehicles, renewable energy and electric aircraft, the APEI power module reduces size and volume of power electronic systems by an order of magnitude over present modules. It also reduces energy loss by greater than 50 percent, which translates into significant potential energy savings.
They have worked with a major aeronautics company to put wireless sensors on turbine blades to monitor them for vibrations. The tips of these blades can heat up to about 500 degrees, so silicon carbide can effectively work for these sensors where other materials will not.
Based on these and other successes, the offices for APEI have expanded from a 150-square-foot room to 10,000 square feet of research and development space and 10,000 square feet of manufacturing space in the new Enterprise Center, which opened in October.
“We’ll be able to take things from an actual concept all the way to a product,” Mounce said.
The company has not sought venture capital to grow; instead, the company is employee owned.
“That’s a challenging way of doing things,” Lostetter said. “It also lets us go where we think we ought to go” in terms of research and development.
Of their 30 employees, 23 have bachelor’s degrees and three are pursuing their bachelor’s degree. Seventeen people have or are pursuing degrees beyond a bachelor’s degree. And most of these employees either have a degree or are pursuing a degree at the University of Arkansas. The company’s policy of supporting employees in furthering their education, plus flexible work hours, free health club memberships and a commitment to work-life balance helped the company win the Silver Award for small companies in the Governor’s Work-Life Balance competition.
“It all comes down to having good people,” Lostetter said.