About SEI.
We are a highly experienced ceramic semiconductor materials science technologies start-up working on non-lithium batteries and multi-junction thin film solar PV.
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About SEI and William Todorof
Founder, CTO and Board Chair William Todorof
William Todorof, our Founder, CTO and Board Chair, studied ceramics in college, after immersing himself in electrical engineering, reading Nikola Tesla and Buckminster Fuller from childhood. Alfred University is the top school for ceramics in the world; it’s where families who own ceramics factories send their children to learn the trade.
The Alfred University Library had purchased a collection of 6,200 books on semiconductors and another 300 on semiconductor defects. William checked out 6 to 10 books a night and had read all of them when he left graduate school in 1966.
The Solar Quest Begins
In 1971 he had a vision of new photovoltaic technology, and over the next 11 years he read over 400,000 papers on ceramic semiconductors to help understand what it meant and how it worked. R. Buckminster Fuller told him, “You will succeed, because you did more research than they did for the Manhattan Project, and if it couldn’t be done, you’d already know it!”
William received a foundational patent in 1983 for a multi-junction thin film solar PV design after 11 years of development. It was a faster-than-gallium-arsenide semiconductor, and NREL calculated it was 22.5% efficient. The best cells, called Violet cells, made in 1983 (for NASA, for space) were only 14% efficient, at a price of $100 per Watt. Solar was not an idea whose time had come, and William was unable to obtain funding to commercialize his disruptive design.
The Battery Quest Begins
In 1985 William recruited a team of 18 world-class automotive engineers to design a 140-mile-per-gallon hybrid car, based on a Saturn, the first American car in production with an electronically-controlled transmission that could be reprogrammed. They soon realized that in a catastrophic collision, the occupants would be bathed in sulfuric acid regardless of how the batteries were secured. (The 14 Dunlop racing batteries were stored in several locations around the car for better weight distribution.)
Unable to accept such an outcome, William started a review of all the existing battery technologies to find one that met all his criteria. The only one that did was saline-based — electrolyte using it could work as a fire extinguisher, and while Voltage is somewhat lower than for lithium batteries, Amperage is effectively unlimited.
William worked on possible breakthroughs in battery design for about 26 years, along with his solar work. Then he started what he thought would be 18 months of battery development, which became over 11 years (like the solar PV)!
William started at 0.55 Volts open circuit, or unloaded Volts (Voc), where most saline battery research leveled off. He worked his way steadily up under very challenging circumstances, until he reached a plateau at 1.08 Voc. When he had been stuck for about a week, he happened to attend a battery conference at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He was vocally frustrated, and the lab director asked him to stay over a day after the conference.
When they met, the lab director said, “The reason you’re stuck is that you’ve reached the theoretical limit for the chemistry you’re working with, which is 1.10 Voc! My 60 PhDs and $40 million in lab equipment would be hard-pressed to replicate the 1.08 Volts you hit — what you did in the back of a truck in a parking lot! How did you do it?”
William showed him his spreadsheet, which had 17 materials, and the lab director said, “We have the fastest computers in the world, which operate at 50 peta-flops [2012 or 2013], and we can only calculate the potential of 5 materials at a time! How did you calculate it?” William said, “I didn’t — I had mixed a number of tests, of about 7 materials each, with different alloyed potentials, and I selected the highest performing ones and re-analyzed the mixes based on their constituent characteristics (which I’d written down).”
In 10 years of work since then, William has tested electrodes at close to 2.5 Voc, and modeled higher. We are looking for funding to take the modeling home, with proofs of concept, pulling the design together, laboratory production of samples, further designs for factories, and ordering pilot plants with higher capacity than what passes for mass production today.
The factories will be built around modular assemblies of highly mature fabrication systems, repurposed to our needs — and the needs of the Planet.
William Todorof, our Founder, CTO and Board Chair, studied ceramics in college, after immersing himself in electrical engineering, reading Nikola Tesla and Buckminster Fuller from childhood. Alfred University is the top school for ceramics in the world; it’s where families who own ceramics factories send their children to learn the trade.
The Alfred University Library had purchased a collection of 6,200 books on semiconductors and another 300 on semiconductor defects. William checked out 6 to 10 books a night and had read all of them when he left graduate school in 1966.
The Solar Quest Begins
In 1971 he had a vision of new photovoltaic technology, and over the next 11 years he read over 400,000 papers on ceramic semiconductors to help understand what it meant and how it worked. R. Buckminster Fuller told him, “You will succeed, because you did more research than they did for the Manhattan Project, and if it couldn’t be done, you’d already know it!”
William received a foundational patent in 1983 for a multi-junction thin film solar PV design after 11 years of development. It was a faster-than-gallium-arsenide semiconductor, and NREL calculated it was 22.5% efficient. The best cells, called Violet cells, made in 1983 (for NASA, for space) were only 14% efficient, at a price of $100 per Watt. Solar was not an idea whose time had come, and William was unable to obtain funding to commercialize his disruptive design.
The Battery Quest Begins
In 1985 William recruited a team of 18 world-class automotive engineers to design a 140-mile-per-gallon hybrid car, based on a Saturn, the first American car in production with an electronically-controlled transmission that could be reprogrammed. They soon realized that in a catastrophic collision, the occupants would be bathed in sulfuric acid regardless of how the batteries were secured. (The 14 Dunlop racing batteries were stored in several locations around the car for better weight distribution.)
Unable to accept such an outcome, William started a review of all the existing battery technologies to find one that met all his criteria. The only one that did was saline-based — electrolyte using it could work as a fire extinguisher, and while Voltage is somewhat lower than for lithium batteries, Amperage is effectively unlimited.
William worked on possible breakthroughs in battery design for about 26 years, along with his solar work. Then he started what he thought would be 18 months of battery development, which became over 11 years (like the solar PV)!
William started at 0.55 Volts open circuit, or unloaded Volts (Voc), where most saline battery research leveled off. He worked his way steadily up under very challenging circumstances, until he reached a plateau at 1.08 Voc. When he had been stuck for about a week, he happened to attend a battery conference at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He was vocally frustrated, and the lab director asked him to stay over a day after the conference.
When they met, the lab director said, “The reason you’re stuck is that you’ve reached the theoretical limit for the chemistry you’re working with, which is 1.10 Voc! My 60 PhDs and $40 million in lab equipment would be hard-pressed to replicate the 1.08 Volts you hit — what you did in the back of a truck in a parking lot! How did you do it?”
William showed him his spreadsheet, which had 17 materials, and the lab director said, “We have the fastest computers in the world, which operate at 50 peta-flops [2012 or 2013], and we can only calculate the potential of 5 materials at a time! How did you calculate it?” William said, “I didn’t — I had mixed a number of tests, of about 7 materials each, with different alloyed potentials, and I selected the highest performing ones and re-analyzed the mixes based on their constituent characteristics (which I’d written down).”
In 10 years of work since then, William has tested electrodes at close to 2.5 Voc, and modeled higher. We are looking for funding to take the modeling home, with proofs of concept, pulling the design together, laboratory production of samples, further designs for factories, and ordering pilot plants with higher capacity than what passes for mass production today.
The factories will be built around modular assemblies of highly mature fabrication systems, repurposed to our needs — and the needs of the Planet.
Our Team
William Todorof
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Mark Roest
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