Electrifying Transportation (and Clearing the Air) at UTS
Unique Technical Services LLC (UTS) has an impressive history of technical innovation – but it’s the future that most excites General Manager Mike Kuhl.
Kuhl, mechanical engineer and an integral member of UTS’s management team, envisions a not-too-distant timeline in which energy efficiency holds sway in everything from power distribution to agriculture to automotive science – and UTS provides customized project-management services for all manners of clean-energy innovations.
With 25 years of combined technical expertise in electrical, mechanical and industrial engineering – not to mention software development and other computer sciences – UTS has a running start on that ambitious future.
The 2012 startup also has numerous U.S. patents in hand, with several others pending. Joe Ambrosio, President and CEO of UTS spinoff Unique Electric Solutions UES), has developed battery-charging systems, new approaches to thermal regulation inside advanced batteries and unique applications in hybrid-powertrain engines; UTS is now leading the “charge” in this area additionally holds other exclusives focused on hybrid electric systems and related transportation technologies.
And, in addition to a talented in-house staff of eight full-time and numerous part-time engineers, UTS enjoys access to an extended network of technology partners, standing by with customized solutions to common and extraordinary R&D, industrial-design and commercialization hurdles.
And they wouldn’t be possible, according to Kuhl, without the Advanced Energy Research and Technology Center, UTS’s longtime home base.
“What’s most powerful for us are two things,” Kuhl says. “The first is the ability to work with others in the building – for instance, we work with NextSwitch and [Stony Brook Electrical Engineering Professor] Slowa Solovyov on a few things.
“And we have access to a wide range of very useful physical tools – power analyzers, load banks, anything we really need,” he adds. “The Advanced Energy Center allows us to do whatever testing we need.”
Behind those tools and connections is the AERTC management team, which has provided immeasurable support to the longtime Advanced Energy Center resident and its chief mechanical engineer.
“Shruti [Sharma, program manager] is great and very helpful about making things happen,” Kuhl says. “And I can’t speak highly enough about [Chief Operating Officer David Hamilton].
“One great example is Amogy, another company Dave met through his different networking efforts,” Kuhl adds. “He put us in touch with them, and it was a match made in heaven.”
Brooklyn-based Amogy promotes “emission-free high-performance mobility” using ammonia as a fuel. In a nutshell, the company aims to run fuel cells on ammonia instead of pure hydrogen – and according to Kuhl, it needed help plotting and executing an important electric-vehicle demonstration project.
“They do what they do very well, and UTS has the electric power trains and the engineers,” Kuhl says. “Dave put us together, and it was synergy.”
While that collaboration makes steady progress, UTS is also working closely with Long Beach-based Radical Clean Solutions, which leverages a unique technology that introduces hydroxyls to airstreams flowing from next-generation HVAC and single-unit air conditioners.
Injecting hydroxyls – oxygen and hydrogen atoms that share electron pairs – “mimics what happens in the upper atmosphere,” according to Kuhl, and has the convenient side effect of eradicating better than 99 percent of airborne and surface pathogens within range.
With UTS pitching in on advanced prototyping and other product-development services, Radical Clean Solutions might be sitting on “a huge game changer for several industries,” notes the engineer, who sees contributions to that product arc as the primary mission of future-focused UTS.
“We take ideas and move them forward,” he notes. “UTS can take prototypes and move them toward production units, and we can move production units toward larger manufacturing.
“We’re just a bunch of engineers who want to create innovative solutions for new technologies,” Kuhl adds. “Amogy and Radical Clean Solutions are really good examples of what UTS does well, and how the Advanced Energy Center continues to support our growth.”