About
I'm an engineer who works on the gap between what a system is supposed to do and what it actually does once it's scaled, loaded, and running in the real world. Thin-film PV, high-volume manufacturing, and the awkward passage from lab validation to factory floor.
Things I've worked on
A 4.5× scale-up that wasn't a staffing problem
A box line was meant to quadruple its output by adding shifts and pushing operators harder, as if throughput were about hours. It wasn't. The ceiling was physical, sitting in the line layout, and no amount of overtime would have moved it. We found it before the ramp; output went from ~2,000 to 9,000+ a day without denting ISO 9001 or the defect rate. The lesson I keep relearning: when people scale by turning up the intensity, the real limit is usually somewhere they haven't looked.
Revenue leaking between tools that were supposed to agree
In a residential PV operation, the quoting tool, the engineering design, and the invoicing logic each told a slightly different story, and the gaps between them quietly bled money. Mapping the full workflow and closing the loop between design and installation recovered about €10k/month and cut per-project design cost by ~29%. Most "hidden" losses aren't hidden; they live in the seams between systems nobody owns end to end.
A thin-film process running closer to the edge than anyone realised
A lab-scale APCVD step was operating near its assumed thermal and process limits, which made every scale-up assumption fragile. Mapping process-to-quality sensitivity (DoE-driven recipe work plus continuous monitoring) widened the usable window, lifted throughput ~50%, and cut TCO sheet resistance ~40%. The point wasn't optimisation; it was understanding where the process would betray you before it did.
Background
Thin-film PV R&D, residential solar design, and high-volume manufacturing, on a foundation of mechanical engineering and sustainable energy systems. Often the person brought in for technical judgment during scale-up, bridging R&D assumptions, production reality, and investor expectations.