Sacramento Inno

May 13, 2023

If the future is going to be electric, LiCAP Technologies Inc. President Linda Zhong is helping to invent how all kinds of industries will be able to store it with sustainable capacitor and battery technology.

Zhong says matter-of-factly that she's got about 100 patents. She says she stopped keeping track a long time ago. According to law search website Justia, Zhong has 97 patents granted and 19 pending.

The recent patents tend to be around the process and manufacture of dry electrodes used in electric storage devices like capacitors and batteries.

The electrode is a major battery component. For most existing batteries, a wet process is used to make electrodes.

The dry manufacturing process developed by LiCAP doesn't produce toxic materials and uses less energy than the current standard process. LiCAP's electrode manufacturing process also takes minutes rather than hours, and it avoids the use of solvents that are dangerous to workers and potentially explosive.

The risk of explosions was what got Zhong into the dry electrode business.

In the late 1990s, she was recruited away from data storage hardware company Seagate Technology Holdings Plc. (Nasdaq: STX) in the East Bay, to work for Maxwell Technologies Inc. in San Diego in research and development of capacitor materials.

Maxwell had a problem: Its capacitors would sometimes explode. Rather than being a storage device, they could become a bomb.

Maxwell was intrigued by Zhong's existing patents and her background in materials science. She had earlier worked on ceramic capacitors at AVX Corp., where she was granted 11 patents.

The problem Maxwell had been having with its exploding capacitors was that there was residual moisture or solvent left over from the wet cathode production process.

"They didn't dry it enough," Zhong said.

Her innovation was a process that doesn't use wet applications, doesn't use solvents and therefore doesn't need to be dried.

She left Maxwell in 2011 to start her own business and "do my own thing."

Zhong started in her garage in Hayward, but eventually moved LiCAP to Rancho Cordova for lower rent.

At Maxwell, Zhong had filed multiple patents every year.

Tesla Inc. (Nasdaq: TSLA) bought Maxwell in 2019, paying $218 million. Tesla sold Maxwell's ultracapacitor business two years later to UCAP Power Inc. of San Diego, but Tesla kept the dry electrode technology that Zhong invented.

Zhong continues to advance electrode technology and manufacturing, working at her lab and manufacturing plant in Rancho Cordova.

To make LiCAP's ultracapacitors, the company's 40 local employees use custom-built equipment to process activated carbon powder into a substance with the consistency of cotton candy, which at that point becomes sticky. LiCAP's process then rolls out that material into thin sheets of carbon. The material is 0.02 to 0.04 centimeters thick at this point. That's important, because the thinner material is, the more cathodes can be wound into a smaller space in a capacitor or battery.

After the first rollout, the material looks like rolls of black paper. The process then laminates two sheets with an aluminum anode bonded at the ends. LiCAP manufactures the sheets at its factory in Sacramento, and then sends rolls of them to a sister company in Tianjin, China, which produces the final products. LiCAP keeps its manufacturing in Sacramento so that its process isn't copied by other companies in China, Zhong said.

"She's got a technology that could become, if not the dominant technology, a major player," said Gary Simon, chairman of CleanStart, a nonprofit that connects and supports clean technology companies in Northern California. "She is a very creative technologist."

LiCAP is now raising $40 million in the next few months to expand its capacity to produce electrodes for lithium batteries using its patented dry technology. It's getting about $10 million from Japanese and German original equipment manufacturers, who she declines to name. LiCAP is raising the other $30 million from investors.

The OEMs are very interested, Zhong said. "We have lots of interest. Our customers are constantly asking for more material."

Zhong came to the U.S. from China in the spring of 1989 to pursue her Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. She arrived just weeks before the student-led Tiananmen Square uprising in Beijing.

"If that had happened earlier, I might not have been able to leave," she said.

Her first job after college was as a materials engineer at Gates Rubber Co. in Kansas. The company made hoses and fan belts, so the focus was on strong materials that can operate under harsh conditions.

In December, LiCAP announced it had a strategic partnership with equipment manufacturer BW Papersystems and German conglomerate Siemens to manufacture and commercialize dry electrode manufacturing systems for the battery cell industry. BW Papersystems is part of Barry-Wehmiller Companies, based in St. Louis.

LiCAP's dry electrode production line in Rancho Cordova is about 30 feet long. A wet electrode line would have to be 10 times larger, said Martin Zea, LiCAP's director of operations.

One of the first high-profile applications for LiCAP's early ultracapacitors was in wind turbines. Unstable wind conditions require wind turbines to be able to adjust the pitch of their blades to compensate for turbulence or to not spin too fast. The industry used onboard batteries to power those rotation motors, but the batteries needed to be replaced every couple years, and it is a dangerous chore to replace them. That is a perfect application for ultracapacitors, which can last 20 years, Zhong said.

The Essentials

Linda Zhong

CEO, LiCAP Technologies Inc.

Age: 59

Education: Ph.D., materials science and engineering, Vanderbilt University, 1994; master's and undergrad degrees in China

Career: CEO, LiCAP Technologies Inc., Nov. 2016-present; founder and entrepreneur with EnerTrode Inc., 2011-2016; senior director of research and development, Maxwell Technologies Inc., 2002-2011; development engineer, Seagate Technology LLC, 1997-2000; product development AVX, 1995-1997; engineer, Gates Industrial Corp., 1995

Personal/family: Married, two adult children; lives in El Dorado Hills

Passion (outside of work and family): Yoga, running and hiking

First job — nonprofessional: Teaching young children