Over the summer, college students Sylvia Berka and Matthew Steil were hired by Carba inc. for a hands-on research and development internship. As engineering interns, their experience was a lesson in teamwork, ingenuity and creative thinking, for as they quickly learned, the problems you encounter outside of the classroom are much trickier to solve.
“Good engineers need to want to solve problems,” Berka said confidently. “Working at a startup, especially in this industry, we’re all very aware that even the higher ups don’t have everything figured out. There will be questions we ask that they may not have the answer to, and then it becomes something we have to figure out together.”
“In school,” Steil added, “literally every problem you’ve been given has a correct answer. But in the real-world, there are a lot of possible solutions and different trade-offs between them. You have to picture the whole system.”
After this experience, he said, he was pleased to discover that “problems are a lot more fun when there isn’t a correct answer.”
Designing real-world solutions
The “problem” the team at Carba is attempting to solve is how to safely remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Since 2021, Carba has combined techniques using photosynthesis, evolutionary biology and reactor engineering to craft a scalable and lasting solution for turning harmful CO2 into a stable form of carbon.
“The heart of this process is the reactor we’ve developed,” explained Ali Zolghadr, an Advanced R&D Engineer at Carba. “So in trying to optimize the reactor, we’ve had a lot of hep from our interns with designing new systems for it.”
Berka started with Carba as an undergrad research assistant, creating CAD models for one of Carba’s burners. She’s since moved up to working on the reactor itself, helping with development and how to make the process cleaner with fewer biproducts. One of their goals is to remove the need for propane to fuel the burner and instead recycle the gases created by the reactor itself.
“Seeing this go from a computer model to something real has been awesome,” Berka said. “Last week, we were even able to test it out. We went to the reactor site and saw it make the flame that we were hoping for. Seeing it all come together was really fun.”
While also helping with reactor development, Steil focused his attention on a separate sub-system, designing the fire box for the burner. This involved calculating the amount of heat it would create and making necessary adjustments for varying sizes.
Steil estimated about a fourth of his work involved physically building the fire box, “which is probably more than you would get in a typical internship like this.”
“Here, you get to see the whole process,” Berka agreed. “From creating your design to building it in real life, you have to think about how you’re going to actually make it into something real.”
New to industry? No problem!
Zolghadr had some experience as an assistant professor prior to joining Carba, but this was his first time working with and managing interns in a professional environment. In a sense, everyone involved was new to the experience; but with a good balance of collaborative and autonomous work, together they made substantial progress.
“Both of them (Berka and Steil) are very good at problem solving. They frequently used the resources at their disposal to research possible solutions and then designed systems to implement them,” Zolghadr recalled. “It was a really good experience.”
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