KR Sridhar (born ) is an

Indian American Indian Americans are Americans whose ancestry originates wholly or partly from India. The terms Asian Indian and East Indian are used to avoid confusion with Native Americans in the United States, Native Americans in the United States, who ar ...

engineer, professor, and entrepreneur. He is the founder, chairman, and

chief executive officer A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a chief executive or managing director, is the top-ranking corporate officer charged with the management of an organization, usually a company or a nonprofit organization. CEOs find roles in variou ...

(CEO) of

Bloom Energy Bloom Energy is an American public company headquartered in San Jose, California. It manufactures and markets solid oxide fuel cells that produce electricity on-site. The company was founded in 2001 and came out of stealth mode in 2010. It raised ...

. He was a professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering as well as Director of the Space Technologies Laboratory (STL) at the

University of Arizona The University of Arizona (Arizona, U of A, UArizona, or UA) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Tucson, Arizona, United States. Founded in 1885 by the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature, it ...

. Sridhar is a member of the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American Nonprofit organization, nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. It is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), along with the National Academ ...

Education

Sridhar was awarded a bachelor's degree in

mechanical engineering Mechanical engineering is the study of physical machines and mechanism (engineering), mechanisms that may involve force and movement. It is an engineering branch that combines engineering physics and engineering mathematics, mathematics principl ...

from the National Institute of Technology at Tiruchirappalli,

Tamil Nadu, India Tamil Nadu (; , TN) is the southernmost States and union territories of India, state of India. The List of states and union territories of India by area, tenth largest Indian state by area and the List of states and union territories of Indi ...

in 1982. He moved to the United States and gained an M.S. in

nuclear engineering Nuclear engineering is the engineering discipline concerned with designing and applying systems that utilize the energy released by nuclear processes. The most prominent application of nuclear engineering is the generation of electricity. Worldwide ...

and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989.

Career

Sridhar was the director of the Space Technologies Laboratory at the

where he was also professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering.

Oxygen production on Mars

The Space Technologies Laboratory was asked by

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the federal government of the United States, US federal government responsible for the United States ...

to undertake research into how life could be made sustainable on

Mars Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun. It is also known as the "Red Planet", because of its orange-red appearance. Mars is a desert-like rocky planet with a tenuous carbon dioxide () atmosphere. At the average surface level the atmosph ...

. The team built a device that could use

solar power Solar power, also known as solar electricity, is the conversion of energy from sunlight into electricity, either directly using photovoltaics (PV) or indirectly using concentrated solar power. Solar panels use the photovoltaic effect to c ...

and water obtained from the planet to power a reactor cell that made

oxygen Oxygen is a chemical element; it has chemical symbol, symbol O and atomic number 8. It is a member of the chalcogen group (periodic table), group in the periodic table, a highly reactivity (chemistry), reactive nonmetal (chemistry), non ...

to breathe and

hydrogen Hydrogen is a chemical element; it has chemical symbol, symbol H and atomic number 1. It is the lightest and abundance of the chemical elements, most abundant chemical element in the universe, constituting about 75% of all baryon, normal matter ...

to power vehicles. Sridhar led a project that built a Mars oxygen production cell using a

yttria-stabilized zirconia Yttria-stabilized zirconia (YSZ) is a ceramic in which the cubic crystal structure of zirconium dioxide is made stable at room temperature by an addition of yttrium oxide. These oxides are commonly called "zirconia" ( Zr O2) and "yttria" ( Y2 O3 ...

solid-electrolyte ionic conductor to electrolyze

carbon dioxide Carbon dioxide is a chemical compound with the chemical formula . It is made up of molecules that each have one carbon atom covalent bond, covalently double bonded to two oxygen atoms. It is found in a gas state at room temperature and at norma ...

into oxygen and carbon monoxide. The oxygen production unit was to fly as part of the MIP ("Mars ISPP Precursor") experiment package that was to be sent to Mars on the

Mars Surveyor 2001 Lander The Mars Surveyor 2001 project was a multi-part Mars exploration mission intended as a follow-up to Mars Surveyor '98. After the two probes of the 1998 project, Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander, were both lost, NASA's "better, faster, ...

mission. This would have been the first demonstration of

in-situ resource utilization In space exploration, in situ resource utilization (ISRU) is the practice of collection, processing, storing and use of materials found or manufactured on other astronomical objects (the Moon, Mars, asteroids, etc.) that replace materials th ...

("ISRU") for propellant production on another planet. However, the 2001 Surveyor Lander mission was cancelled after the failure of the

Mars Polar Lander The Mars Polar Lander, also known as the Mars Surveyor '98 Lander, was a 290-kilogram uncrewed spacecraft lander launched by NASA on January 3, 1999, to study the soil and climate of Planum Australe, a region near the south pole on Mars. It fo ...

, which used an identical spacecraft.

Bloom Energy

After NASA cancelled the Mars-2001 Surveyor Lander mission, Sridhar started working on reversing the process, using oxygen and hydrogen to create power. In 2001, Sridhar was a co-founder of Ion America, later to become Bloom Energy, with a mission to "make clean, reliable energy affordable for everyone on earth". Sridhar became the chief executive officer. In 2002, the company moved to the

NASA Ames Research Center The Ames Research Center (ARC), also known as NASA Ames, is a major NASA research center at Moffett Federal Airfield in California's Silicon Valley. It was founded in 1939 as the second National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) laborat ...

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that is a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical area of the Santa Clara Valley ...

. On 24 February 2010, Bloom Energy launched a new energy-efficient and environmentally friendly

fuel cell A fuel cell is an electrochemical cell that converts the chemical energy of a fuel (often hydrogen fuel, hydrogen) and an oxidizing agent (often oxygen) into electricity through a pair of redox reactions. Fuel cells are different from most bat ...

known as the Bloom Box. ,

natural gas Natural gas (also fossil gas, methane gas, and gas) is a naturally occurring compound of gaseous hydrocarbons, primarily methane (95%), small amounts of higher alkanes, and traces of carbon dioxide and nitrogen, hydrogen sulfide and helium ...

and atmospheric oxygen are pumped through a stack of cells, producing electricity, but theoretically any other gaseous fuel could be used. The energy is clean and inexpensive, but development and production of this fuel cell required a large initial investment of $100 million. Sridhar was able to obtain funding for the project from investors such as Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and

New Enterprise Associates New Enterprise Associates (NEA) is an American-based venture capital firm. NEA focuses investment stages ranging from seed stage through growth stage across an array of industry sectors. With over $25 billion in committed capital, NEA is one of t ...

. Kleiner is represented on the Bloom Energy board of directors by

John Doerr L. John Doerr (born June 29, 1951) is an American investor and venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins in Menlo Park, California. In February 2009, Doerr was appointed a member of the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board to provide the ...

, an early investor in companies such as Amazon and Google as well.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sridhar, K. R. Indian emigrants to the United States University of Arizona faculty 1960s births National Institutes of Technology alumni Living people American people of Indian descent American businesspeople National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli alumni Grainger College of Engineering alumni American people of Indian Tamil descent 21st-century American inventors Year of birth missing (living people)