Akshat Jiwan Sharma

Posts

Affordability begins with industry and USA needs to regain it's manufacturing advantage

Senator Chris Coons recently critiqued policies of president Trump by saying "Trump promised to lower costs on day 1, and yet as prices keep rising on everything from gas to groceries to health care, he calls affordability a "hoax". It doesn’t need to be this way. Americans deserve leaders who care about affordability and are willing to do something about it." https://www.facebook.com/share/p/186KVFsrQ9/ He is right. Affordability has become a problem in the USA and the best way to improve affordability is to start manufacturing goods again instead of importing it from Asia. But there are several problems with that. American consumers are not willing to pay increased costs of manufacturing due to rightful demands by workers to increase wages This is understandable. The marketplace can be brutal that way. Especially in segments that are highly contested. This is why it is important to continue to build new industries that can sustain growth. The energy and power ...

Commercialising thermal energy storage: Progress made and challenges that lie ahead

7 Jul 2026 I thank the Renewable Thermal Collaborative (RTC) for organising a webinar highlighting some of the recent achievements of thermal energy storage technologies. Conceptually thermal-energy storage is quite simple. You heat up a material and it stores energy either in the form of sensible heat, latent heat (phase change) or thermochemically. At medium grade, with temperatures of up to 400C, these systems are hard to beat as they can provide industrially useful heat. This stored heat is highly valuable in food processing and bio refining industries because process temperatures rarely exceed 200C. Besides food processing there are several other industries that can use medium grade heat for drying and preheating. Since heat is used in all industries, it is the single unifying theme of the entire manufacturing sector and residential too because many electrical appliances are performing temp control work. Thermal energy storage technology is ther...

Fundamental research as an entrepreneurial activity

2 Jul 2026 Great honor to be a part of discussion led by Prof Vasi,Electrical Engg,IIT Bombay on industry academia collaboration. Research has always had to and will always have to balance funding from government and industry while pursuing something that is truly novel ,yet can have practical applications in the future. Directed research has its merit. But nothing beats original ,curiosity driven enquiry. Majority of science and all of its transformative ideas that we take for granted today were discovered by people who were merely following their curiosity and not thinking about immediate applications. Those came decades later. All pioneers were explorers — they built new fields where no expertise existed. Fundamental research carries with it the potential to create new industries, it's difficult to put a dollar value on it and it can't exactly be funded in the same way as a typical R&D lab with a fixed outcome or a deliverable. Scientific inquires can be a...

Discussion on Plasma modelling in physics of plasmas monthly webinar

I thank the American institute of physics for organising their monthly Physics of plasma webinar series and for giving me. a chance to interact with some of the leading researchers in plasma science. On several occasions I have remarked that plasma science is possibly one of the most important areas of research that has the potential to impact almost every engineering and scientific domain. Medicine ,power,communication,chemical,materials,electronics ,packaging,food and more. Therefore I was extremely excited to attend this month's webinar presented by Igor Kaganovich [1],highlighting this multidisciplinary aspect of plasma science and his work at the Princeton plasma physics laboratory. While his presentation dived deep into plasma modelling using Particle in cell approach as well as other models like , Vlasov and Poisson Boltzmann the most significant aspect of his presentation was the one slide in which he demonstrated the overlap between plasma models used in fusio...

Panel discussion on USA's deep space engg excellence

I thank the American Center for inviting me to a panel discussion on USA’s engineering excellence that has made the USA the leader in deep space exploration. While NASA had its origin in Aeronautics, its pivot towards space exploration during the cold war era birthed the space industry. Since then it has launched several lunar,mars,outerplanetary and deep space missions collecting invaluable data that has advanced humankind's understanding of the universe and essentially created astrophysics as a career option for some of the brightest minds in physics. Missions like voyager which were originally intended for a tour of outer planets — jupiter,saturn,uranus,neptune have far gone beyond their intended expedition, travelled billions of kms and have sent data on heliosphere that has directly led to projects like the SHIELD being developed in Boston University [1] Rockets often take the limelight in space projects but nearly every aspect of the program relies up...

Battery interconnects & industrial bottlenecks to electrification

I thank ASM for organising a technical discussion on lithium ion battery interconnects. A typical battery pack could contain anywhere from a couple to thousands of cells depending upon whether it's being used for consumer electronics or high power EVs. Battery chemistry requires different electrode materials and the same battery chemistry requires different current collectors at Cathode(Al) and Anode (Cu). This works for individual cells. During assembly however when the cells have to be connected in series or in parallel things break down. Because Al & Cu don't weld well and they suffer from galvanic corrosion, new material processing techniques are necessary to enable fast wiring of batteries. Cold cladding is an industry standard that has now proven itself. Copper and aluminum are cold welded at high pressures and they form an airtight atomic bond without any intermediate oxide/intermetallic layer on the Al side. This discussion highlighted Materions particular ...