Spotlight on Paul Robson

In our second ‘Spotlight on’ series providing a behind-the-scenes look into our EV charging scale-up, we caught up with Paul in engineering.

The engineering team are quite literally putting the building blocks in place as we prepare for commercialisation. They are at the forefront of technological breakthroughs, always with a focus on R&D while also delivering to our technical road map.

Paul has 20 years engineering experience designing electrified systems across automotive, aerospace and motorsport industries as well as a PhD in aerospace engineering to his name.

Why did you become an engineer?

My father was the Engineering Manager at our local TV studios, Tyne Tees Television, I thought he had the coolest job meeting celebrities and seeing the latest bands, so I followed in his footsteps. Also growing up in rural Northumberland, there was a constant stream of low-flying military jets over our house, and it gets you thinking about the physics! Petalite doesn’t have celebrities or fighter jets, but it’s doing some pretty cool stuff.   

What does your role as technical specialist in product development involve?

It’s about being a multi-disciplined engineering facilitator.  Having an understanding of a range of challenging concepts, while not necessarily being an expert in them.  It’s about being the person who can get a handle on things, who can step back and see the bigger picture.  It’s a mixture of design and development and supplier management – helping to steer things in the right direction. Driving towards a superior product that beats the competition!

Having worked on some very challenging projects across my career, you learn to know when to keep going, when to stop, when to reflect and when to push.  People earlier in their career haven’t seen that yet.  It’s about sharing your expertise and judgement in situations. It’s about not being too obsessed by the trivial, but focused on what you need to deliver and how best to deliver it. It’s not always a perfect world, but you push things forward by accounting for and understanding the risk. You learn to be pragmatic, because you never have the full set of facts and figures, everything is a trade-off…but safety comes first.

What does a typical day for you look like?

There is no such thing as a typical day, but it’s often an interesting mix of:

• Really cutting-edge R&D. Proving the designs we’ve got through simulation and test work.
• Talking to suppliers in relation to the performance characteristics and supply of the advanced materials and components within the build.
• At the same time being focused on the longer time scales and the technical roadmap.

I aim to make progress on all fronts, every day, obviously though challenges crop up…but it would be dull without them, and sometimes you need to step back to jump forward!

Tell us a bit more about the vision on the longer-term time scales.

Bringing to the table what the cutting edge is in both industry and academia. In terms of what technology is appropriate to incorporate into the solution. So, over the next five years, we have a product that just keeps evolving, getting better all the time and can beat the competition. These days developing and maintaining a robust supply chain is also vital and needs to be factored into the decision-making from the start.

We are always balancing short term customer delivery, with long term R&D, and blending in new features when appropriate, to increase system power, increase lifetime and get the cost down.

How do you bring your experience from related sectors into your work?

Many of the Petalite team, including myself have experience of the ultra-competitive world of motorsport. It’s all about:

• saving weight
• reducing volume
• increasing the power
• reducing the loss
• thermal management…. the list goes on!

There’s always an opportunity to improve things. You just need to know where your priorities are. Is it cost, is it weight, is it reliability? Is it something else?
Everything is just a multi-dimensional, multi-physics problem. So, what I mean by that is, it’s always a compromise between the electrical, thermal, structural and the mechanical side, there’s all these trade-offs. With experience, you also tend to appreciate more of the subtle interactions at play. You’ve got to understand what your customers and end-users want, although as any engineer will tell you, you are often educating them about what they really need.

What’s makes Petalite an exciting place to work?

Every day is exciting! For example, the other day in testing, the R&D team set something up slightly incorrectly. The set-up physically looked the same, however a different material with different properties had also crept in. That really excites me because we’ve got everything in a controlled situation. A like-for-like comparison in an instant, of these two materials and how they’re performing back-to-back with all the parameters captured.  You wouldn’t design the test that way to start with. But when I saw that done, I was more excited about those results than anything else.

But then that’s engineering for you, often some of the greatest steps forward come when things deviate from the plan.

It’s part of our culture that if people have done the best at the time and taken decisions in good faith, then management is sympathetic to that.

We are open, we are all human and mistakes are occasionally made, but I truly believe everything is an opportunity to grow and learn. It is all about stepping-back and seeing the bigger picture.

How is Petalite different to where you’ve worked before? 

It’s just so rare in someone’s career to join a company which is on the cusp of something huge.  To be in the right place, at the right time and to feel that you can actually make a difference. We have an elegant technical solution and our charge stations will be appearing across the UK very shortly. There’s no big company bureaucracy – we’re in charge of our own destiny. As an individual, I feel I can instantly see my contribution. I feel valued, and I can see the value I’m adding, and obviously that’s really motivating.

What’s surprised you about Petalite?

So much of the global EV propulsion landscape has it’s origins in the UK. The UK has a history of generating new ideas. Yet, this company was in my backyard, and 12 months ago I hadn’t heard of Petalite. It’s not being developed in South Korea, Japan, the US or India, it’s happening here in Birmingham. And I’m just so excited to be able to play a part in it.

It’s been off the radar for so long and it’s almost unbelievable that the world is crying out for a better EV charging technology and we have the answer. I feel like we’re just at a potential tipping point of real change.