Earth Angels: The Inventor

Yet-Ming Chiang's rechargeable battery is safe and powerful enough to be used in efficient hybrid cars - and Detroit has taken notice.

(Photo by Tanit Sakakini)

Yet-Ming Chiang came to this country from Taiwan when he was 6, left for MIT when he was 18, and never looked back. "I've been at MIT since I was a freshman," he says. Chiang, now 49, worked his way up the conventional research ladder, publishing articles in scholarly journals before starting a company based on his ideas. "After I was an academic for 10 years, I had done a lot of work at idea generation, which is very satisfying," the Framingham resident says. "I started to think how to do things in a practical sense."

By 1997, he was working on materials used in batteries. The rechargeable lithium batteries that power all manner of modern conveniences, most notably cellphones and laptops, were unsuitable for larger devices. They needed to be recharged too often, and they had a nasty tendency to explode - not necessarily a problem in small devices like cellphones, but a considerable one in something as big as a construction drill or, especially, a vehicle. Chiang set about developing a rechargeable battery to be used in more powerful applications.

With two other men, he founded A123Systems in Watertown. Since then, the company has developed a battery based on metal phosphates that functions through nanotechnology and that can be recharged by plugging it into any home outlet. The new battery already has been central to work on two hybrid vehicles being developed by General Motors - the Saturn Vue plug-in and the Chevrolet Volt. "I wanted to accomplish something I can point to and say, 'Research I did led to this thing having an impact on people's lives,' " Chiang says.