When Samuel Bendek, a current mechanical engineering sophomore at UMBC, was still in high school, he worked in a soccer ball factory in his native country of Colombia. At some point, he was given the job of figuring out how much energy the balls retained after bouncing off a wall.
He went to work, measuring and calculating. “And it turned out, it was greater than 90 percent,” Bendek says. “I was surprised that a soccer ball is so energy efficient!”
The balls were made from natural rubber, made from the sap of certain trees. When the balls hit a wall, the rubber compresses, storing the kinetic energy from their motion in elastic potential energy. Then, as the balls bounce back, the elastic potential energy turns back into kinetic energy, with very low energy loss.
The experience got Bendek thinking—what if rubber could store more than the energy of a soccer player’s kick? What if it could store energy from the sun and the wind?
About five years later, Bendek and his sister and fellow entrepreneur Juliana Bendek pitched that very idea on the stage at the inaugural Maryland Student Ventures Showcase, held February 18 in Baltimore to celebrate the nine local student ventures selected for the first-ever Pava LaPere Innovation Awards. As an award-winner, the Bendeks’ company Elastic Energy will receive $50,000 from the state of Maryland to further its development of a mechanical battery made from natural rubber.
The award and showcase marked the latest step in Bendek’s entrepreneurial journey. Along the way he has embraced the support and guidance of friends, family, and mentors, from UMBC and beyond.
“I have always wanted to create things, since I was a kid destroying my grandmother’s clock to build a new toy,” says Bendek. “This is an opportunity to create something that makes the world a better place.”
From garage tinkering to investor meetings
Shortly after his soccer-ball-inspired light-bulb moment, Bendek got to work in his proverbial garage, experimenting with different ways to stretch rubber and store energy. When he had a decent prototype, he recruited his sister to join his efforts.
“My sister is super smart and very good at connecting to people,” says Bendek. “When I had the prototype, I called her up at like 2 a.m. in the morning. I said, ‘It’ll work. Let’s do this thing together.’”
With some initial funding from family and friends the two started developing the next phase of the technology, while also pitching new investors and building out their team.
Along the way, Bendek, who is also a competitive swimmer, was recruited by UMBC and decided to become a Retriever. He took his dreams to Maryland, and it didn’t take him long to connect with UMBC’s resources for student entrepreneurs.
He reached out to Kevin Fulmer, the director of the Alex. Brown Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, which supports the entrepreneurial mindset at UMBC with courses, speaker series featuring business leaders, startup accelerator programs, and assistance with business ideas and networking with experts.
“I met Samuel when he was still a first-year student,” says Fulmer. “He came in with a slide deck that included pictures of a working prototype, and I was really impressed. We started meeting on a regular basis and it’s been really fun to see his progress and certainly exciting to see him win things like this $50,000 grant.”
“Kevin has helped me a lot,” says Bendek. “He helped me build a business plan, put me in touch with local experts, and helped find opportunities like the Pava LaPere Innovation Grant.”
Imagining a clean energy future
The batteries Bendek’s company plans to build are slim cylinders a little taller than an average person. Inside, a motor, ideally powered by solar cells or other renewable sources of energy, stretches a 100-meter elastic band to more than ten times its original length by winding it around an inner core. When the power to the motor is turned off, the system can go into reverse. The motor becomes an electric generator, powered by the unwinding elastic band.
Each battery can store about 1 kilowatt-hours of energy—For comparison, a typical American household uses about 30 kilowatt hours of electricity a day.
While Elastic Energy’s batteries cannot provide as much energy as chemical batteries of the same weight, Bendek says their main selling points are that they are long-lasting, relatively inexpensive, and don’t require the mining of minerals like lithium, which can damage the environment and also lead to geopolitical tensions due to the minerals’ uneven distribution around the world.
The company plans to first target the consumer market, offering the batteries as backup power for homes or RVs. Eventually, they hope they can become part of the solution for grid-scale energy storage.
Bendek plans to test the technology this summer in a remote, off-grid town in Colombia to demonstrate its viability.
“These batteries are a technology that really has the potential to grow, I’m confident of that,” says Fulmer. “And Samuel has a great mindset—the entrepreneurial mindset of making things happen.”
Tags: Alex Brown Center for Entrepreneurship, COEIT, MechE
