April 2009

Interview with Sharon Beermann-Curtin, Program Manager, Defense Sciences Office

Jan Walker: Well, today, we're here with Sharon Beermann Curtin, who's a program manager in our Defense Sciences Office. Is there an overarching focus that kind of guides you as you move into a particular program arena?

Sharon: All of the programs that I'm working on have an application for the military. So, any time that we get into an area, it's really focused on something that the military can use. You'll see, in the newspaper and in publications, there's a lot going on in power and energy. But, our focus is not for commercial industry but in taking it to the next step, where we need extra things for the military, such as scalability or portability or materials that work for us that might not necessarily be... Take solar cells, for instance. Solar cells that we need would be flexible and man portable, versus solar cells that you'd lay on top of a roof.

Jan: OK. I know one thing that is important to the military is small power, man–portable power. So, talk to me a little bit about where your focus is there and how you think you might make a difference in that area.

Sharon: We have a couple different technologies that are focused on the smaller, man–portable type, how to make our power systems more efficient, really to potentially make batteries obsolete. The fuel cells are really a game changer.

For our unmanned aerial systems and unmanned ground systems, they give them longer endurance. So, where you could take a battery and it could run a system for two, three hours, a fuel cell, depending on the amount of fuel that you connect to it you would have a longer endurance. So, my air vehicle could go for seven hours, versus two hours. Therefore, we get better range, more time on target.

The other thing that the fuel cells are really going to make a difference is in disaster relief. The military does a lot of disaster relief — the tsunami, hurricanes. And what you want to do when you get there is actually set up a command and control center. You want to be able to communicate with the workers. So, you'd be able to run your laptops in a situation where you don't have electricity. In all of these disasters, you never have electricity available, and so you have to bring in batteries or generators. And fuel cells can run straight off of propane, typically, that indigenous people have and they use for their cooking. So, we have taken that technology to where it's actually viable and it's robust and it's reliable.

But, one of the places that fuel cells, also, for the military. . . . If I have a system that I want to leave behind, but I want it to be doing surveillance and powering up a system, I can keep my soldier out of harm's way because I only have to go back and give it fuel maybe once a week, versus, on a battery, I'd have to have a guy go back up and attach a new battery every day.

Jan: Now, when you talk about fuel cells, some people may be familiar with fuel cells in cars.

Sharon: My fuel cells are not in the kilowatt size. And the DARPA—hard thing was to shrink these fuel cells down into a man–portable size. Our fuel cells are 25 to 200 watts, geared at man portable and small vehicular sizes.

Jan: Now, you took some fuel cells over to the Cobra Gold exercise. What did they use those fuel cells for there?

Sharon: The Cobra Gold was a disaster relief exercise that was run in Thailand. And we used them for communications. So, they used them on their radios. They powered up their radio systems, and they also powered up laptops.

Jan: Was that the first time that they had been using fuel cells? They're used to taking their laptop and plugging it into the wall. But now, they had to turn on a fuel cell? I don't even know how you turn on a fuel cell.

Sharon: Oh, right. [laughs] That's interesting. Yes. Actually, the fuel cell just, basically, it's a chemical reaction, but it uses fuel and it converts it to electricity. So, whereas a battery does an internal, hermetically sealed chemical reaction, a fuel cell is actually taking oxygen and a fuel and providing the electricity from that.

Jan: So, what did the users think? Did they have any issues with doing that to turn on their laptops and their radios?

Sharon: No. We have cords and adapters that make it just seem just almost as if you have a battery, but you have, instead, a fuel cell.

This whole program had been focused originally on shrinking the components in the fuel cell. They were quite large 10 years ago, if you wanted to get down to sizes, power that was man-portable. And then this last year, we've been focused specifically on demonstrations and robust, making them robust.

They last up to 1500 hours, for a mission.

Jan: And you don't need a PhD to operate them.

Sharon: You do not need a PhD. In fact, they actually have little LED monitors on them that tell you how much fuel is left and the life cycle, and if something begins to go wrong, they indicate that. So, actually, they're like a smart battery. [laughs]

Jan: And I understand one of your other areas is high power electronics. So, talk to me a little bit about why the military needs high power electronics and what are the technical challenges there.

Sharon: OK. Yes. I have two programs in high power, and it is capacitors and silicon carbide based materials. And basically, what happens is that, if you think of an electrical power system, if you're civilian and you're commercial industry, you have a lot of room to lay out a large power system. You can put it out across an acre. But, we have to have very high power on our platforms, our ships, our tanks. And what happens is that we don't have a lot of real estate. We don't have a lot of space. So, what happens is that we have to bring, what would typically be put out by the power grid across acres, we have to put it into a very small space, inside the hull of a ship or inside a tank.

And it's a continuous thing with power. The more power that you give somebody, the more power they want. They go from, "Well, we only want to go 20 knots," to "We want to go 50 knots." Of course, then you need to handle more power.

And then, also, we are starting to go into these weapons systems that are electrical powered weapons systems, and our radar systems, and any type of defenses system.

There're many things that we use electrical power for. And as it becomes available, they continue to want it. So, we have to continue to push the materials.

And so the silicon carbide program — silicon carbide, actually, is 10 times more powerful than silicon. You can think of it that way. And so, what happens is that if I can actually convert my power and my electricity to a form that I need, in a much smaller volume, that helps.

If I can, also, silicon carbide allows me to go to very high frequencies. Typically, silicon can handle a couple of kilohertz, but silicon carbide can go up to 10 to 20 kilohertz. And so that allows me to shrink my system down as well, because my capacitors and my inductors can shrink in size as we go up in frequency.

Jan: Let's see. The one thing we haven't touched on so far is alternative energy. Are you doing anything in that area?

Sharon: Yes. And actually, for me, the alternative energy area is very exciting. We have a program that we just kicked off called Surface Catalysis, and the whole idea there is can we try to make JP 8, or a fuel that the military uses, by getting more efficient. And what I mean by more efficient is that right now when they talk about biomass and actually breaking down the biomass, the way they break down the biomass is through enzymes and acids. And so, basically, what we want to try to do is use chemistry. Can we get away from the enzymes and use chemistry to more efficiently do the breakdown of the biomass?

And another piece of that program is can we use sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water? So, basically, all waste products. Can we take these waste products and break them down into carbon monoxide and hydrogen and then rebuild them into a fuel that we want to use? And that's basically what we're trying to do is, can we actually make our designer fuel, and can we do it by using sunlight?

And the key is, can we efficiently capture the protons, can we efficiently make them into electrons, and then can we efficiently, at the same time, break down our chemistry using those electrons? And that's really what we're trying to do. We're trying to take advantage of the protons from the sunlight, convert them to electrons, use those electrons to break down our chemistry. And then, hopefully, you could use another process that's already in existence, Fischer-Tropsch. If we can efficiently do this, then we can start making it an area that is acceptable; because right now the efficiencies that you need are a lot of solar collectors, you need a lot of solar cells.

What we want to actually do is make it very efficient to bring down the area. So, it would be something I could bring out to the field. If I have a forward operating base, I might be OK to say, I can use half an acre but a hundred acres isn't going to work.

Jan: So, right now to break down the biomass and turn it into a biofuel, they use enzymes and the enzymes are not efficient, or why are we trying to find a better technology than enzymes?

Sharon: Because the enzymes like to work at certain temperatures, they die; and our focus is to have non–sacrificial catalysts. So, basically, I have catalysts on my materials that will regenerate themselves through different processes. That's the main thing. We don't want to keep having to put in more enzymes. We want to have a chemistry that is actually non–sacrificial so we can keep it going and have lower maintenance on it.

Jan: You talked a little bit about the use of carbon dioxide. Is that an alternate approach other than the catalysis or is that part of the same thing?

Sharon: The catalysis is actually how we break the carbon dioxide. We want to rip an oxygen off the carbon dioxide. So, you're taking an oxygen molecule and we're ripping it off to get carbon monoxide, much the way they do the hydrolysis where they have H2O, they have water, and they want to rip off the oxygen to make hydrogen. That's not hard, but if I have to use electricity that I generated using coal I start getting into the negative. What I want to do is take advantage of sunlight, which is free, to grab the electricity to pull my molecules apart, and then, you can put them back together the way you want them. And one of the key things is you don't want a lot of oxygen. You really do want to get rid of the oxygen.

One of the things is, there's not a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere so what you might want to do is either develop ways to get the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere efficiently or be at a place where you have a lot of carbon dioxide emission anyway, such as coal plants or cement factories. If you're hooked up to something like that, then you have a ready supply of carbon dioxide.

Jan: How would that work for the military? Where would the military at a forward operating base, for example, get the carbon dioxide?

Sharon: One of the things that we are looking into is how do you efficiently scavenge carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Right now, it's not really viable.

Jan: OK. tell us a little bit about your time at DARPA. I understand that you started at one office and now you are in another office. How did that work?

Sharon: Yes, I have the advantage of having worked in two different offices at DARPA. DARPA offices are very different. They have their own personalities, and they are all great. What happened is that I came into DARPA. . . . My background, I'm an electrical engineer, high power electronics. I came from the office of naval research. I worked on high power electrical systems, torpedoes and what happened is I started working on this little silicon carbide program. The main thing you are supposed to be doing when you are at DARPA is starting programs and that's your job.

What happens is you quickly get out of your comfort zone. OK, so I am supposed to be starting new programs, but I started the things I came to start and now I have to start looking around and where am I really interested. So, what happens is, with me, I really believe that if you are going to make a change to the systems, a real change, usually it starts in the materials. So, you have to come up with new materials, and that leads you into the chemistry.

The programs that I started putting forth to the director really were chemistry, chemical programs, material programs.

What ended up happening was one day I just said, " I have this micro power battery program. I really want to do it, but it's a DSO [Defense Sciences Office] program and everything I came to do became DSO." I just went up to the director and said, "You know, why don't you just move me to DSO?"

He moved me to DSO, and from there I've been working on materials and chemistry which has really been a lot of fun because it's really gotten me out of my comfort zone. That's one of the really good things about DARPA is it allows you to expand. It allows you to go into areas that you really feel passionate about and see new things and learn. That's the main thing.

In fact, probably you've heard this before, but the best in the field want to talk to me because, maybe, if I am interested. . . . The way you start programs at DARPA is you get a program manager interested. So, if I have a question, they are happy to give me 15 to 20 minutes and talk to me about what I don't understand. So, it's been a great learning experience as well.

Jan: Are you getting to the end of your time here at DARPA? Do you know what you want to do next?

Sharon: Yes, actually I am very excited since I've gotten into this new area, gotten away from the electrical. I'm still doing it but I've really gotten into alternative energy and different power systems pretty much across the board.

Jan: What would you say is the best thing about working at DARPA? What did you enjoy the most?

Sharon: I have to say that the thing that I enjoyed the most was actually that you didn't just get handed the money. You actually had to work for it. And so, therefore, if you had an idea it got scrutinized at every level and you really had to do your homework. You had to go back and you had to say this is a good idea. This is why it is going to make some other technology that we are using today obsolete. This is why we have to have a program in this. The U.S. military needs this. You had to put together that case. You had to have done your homework. You had to know everything about it, so it made you learn. It made you defend it.

It was really a little bit of marketing, I suppose, as well because you had to get in front of the director. There was always time for the program managers to get in front of the director, and you had to present your program and fight for it. So, you had to be passionate about it. You didn't want to waste your time on something you didn't believe in because you wouldn't get past all the questioning.

To make a long story short, my favorite part was that I really had to defend the programs. But, it really was a lot of fun when you were successful.