LEADERSHIP & EXPERTISE
Our Team
Joe Hensel
CEO & Founder, HybriMet™ LLC
Joe Hensel is an entrepreneur and technology commercialization strategist with extensive experience in advanced materials and advanced energy. His expertise includes inventive thinking, innovation, new product development, product commercialization, and business startup and management. He is a past Director at Western Reserve Controls, a manufacturer of I/O and distributed controls for industrial applications. He previously was the Director of Technology Development for MegaJoule Inc, developing asymmetric capacitors for high power and energy, grid level electricity storage. Mr. Hensel, as the past Chief Operating Officer of Powdermet Inc., a nano-engineered powders development company, identified technologies for commercialization and was the lead in the commercialization of Powdermet’s HybriMet™ nano-engineered metal matrix composite materials and is now the CEO of HybriMet™ LLC, a company organized to commercialize metal matrix composite materials.
Past technical accomplishments include the development of controlled dielectric, low dissipation materials and constructions for RF circuits and antennas, the plastic ablative nose cone for a hypersonic missile, and the development of the OEM radome for the Boeing Dreamliner aircraft. He has developed self-lubricating materials and bearings for use in extreme environments for aerospace, military and commercial applications including the wrist and elbow bearings for the Spar Aerospace Remote Manipulator Arm for the Space Shuttle and the wing bearing pads for the B-1. For Concentrated Solar Power, he developed test fixtures to measure bearing wear and erosion on pump and valve components in 720⁰C molten chloride salts.
He has held executive management positions with advanced materials companies, Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics, Norton Company and Rogers Corporation. He holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Chemical Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and an MBA in Finance from Georgia State University.
Dan Barth
Technical Market Representative, HybriMet™ LLC
Dan Barth is recognized as one of the foremost global experts in designing, engineering, and manufacturing custom high-temperature molten salt and molten sodium pumping systems. With over 40 years of experience, he specializes in critical components for niche engineering markets like solar power, nuclear energy, industrial processing, and metal manufacturing (such as magnesium and titanium).
Mr. Barth routinely consults worldwide with major industrial companies and National Laboratories to design systems, develop critical components, and troubleshoot operating flaws. He is highly regarded for his technical publications regarding high temperature molten salt pumps, specializing in navigating the intense physical strains of extreme thermal expansion, heat migration up pump shafts, and system freeze-ups.
As the Business Development Manager of High Temperature System Designs, LLC (HTSD) he brings to HybriMet™ LLC decades of expertise to handle complex, high-consequence fluid environments. This includes full design, construction, risk assessment, and operational management of molten salt systems, specialized component development custom pumps & valves, and high-precision engineering for multi-axis thermal expansion, fluid forces, and self-draining slopes for industrial system piping.