Happy Nice Mall

Rod Bayliss III ’20, one of the things MEng ’21 most clearly remembers from his childhood is his father’s 1964 Ford Mustang. “I was fascinated by that car,” says Bayliss. “It’s this thing that converts oxygen and fuel into power, especially from the engine side.”

Bayliss grew up in Augusta, Georgia. Math and physics came easily to him, and in high school he developed a passion for Latin, Greek and debating. “I especially liked Latin grammar,” he recalls, “with inflections that let you move words around in a sentence. It reminded me of solving engineering problems.”

Bayliss’s parents, who both hold engineering degrees, urged Bayliss to consider career opportunities in electrical engineering. At MIT, he enrolled to work with professor David Perreault, SM ’91, PhD ’97, on power electronics research through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP).

“At the time, I still thought I wanted to work on engines,” Bayliss says. “But at that UROP I discovered power electronics. The practice of moving energy. That’s the name of the game and I loved it.”

After learning how electrical energy is generated, stored, and converted, he began work on an inductor (a device that can store large amounts of magnetic energy) that would generate high-frequency radio waves, a crucial element in the etching process of ultrafine silicon. chips. “You put the gas in a chamber and then you use these radio waves to phase change the gas into plasma,” he explains. “Then you direct the plasma to etch. The process requires a huge amount of energy.”

After completing his undergraduate studies in three and a half years, Bayliss stayed at MIT for another year and continued to perfect his inductor, earning his master’s degree in January 2021. He is currently in the PhD program at the University of California. Berkeley.

Fittingly, he returned to his first engineering passion: engines. Specifically, it is exploring new methods to store electrical energy and convert it into a form that can reliably power an aircraft engine. Last March, this work won the Bayliss first prize at the MIT (BAMIT) research competition, an online competition where alumni present their research to a panel of judges.

Bayliss knows the intent is complex. “Powering an airplane is uniquely more difficult than using fossil fuels,” he says. “Batteries are heavy. And the consequences of system failure mid-flight, from battery to inverter to motor, would be disastrous. But we will get this aircraft power electronics to work.”