Dinakar Sagapuram Assistant Professor & Inventor

Details
Grand Challenge
Manufacturing
Technology
Steel
Location
College Station, TX
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Company Info
MetPeel is a new manufacturing process for making steel sheet and strip using a unique low-temperature, single-step process in place of conventional fossil-fired hot rolling
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As an Assistant Professor in industrial engineering at Texas A&M, Dinakar joins Breakthrough Energy’s Innovator Fellows with his cutting-edge steel strip manufacturing process, MetPeel. Steel sheet and strip, which makes up more than 55% of all steel products worldwide, is traditionally manufactured using energy-intensive and complex rolling processes that rely on fossil fuels and large, wasteful production plants. Without a clean solution, steel sheet and strip manufacturing would release more than 1.4 billion tons of carbon emissions per year by 2050.
MetPeel disrupts the traditional manufacturing processes by producing steel strip through a more efficient, emission-free, single-step process of peeling a thin foil from the circumference of a rotating metal feedstock using only electricity for power.
Dinakar chose to headquarter the research and development process at Texas A&M, in College Station, Texas, where he’s worked since 2016. There he can access the support structure and resources from Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station.
Dinakar grew up in Andhra Pradesh, a province in southern India, and received his Bachelor of Science in materials engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. Prior to joining Texas A&M, he received his Doctor of Philosophy in materials engineering and completed postdoctoral research at the Center for Materials Processing and Tribology at Purdue University.