We design systems and develop diagnostics and control algorithms for electrochemical energy devices such as batteries and supercapacitors, in applications from electric cars to grid power systems.
The group is led by Associate Professor David Howey at the Department of Engineering Science in the University of Oxford.
Our aim is to improve performance and cost by predicting dynamics and lifetime, estimating temperatures and faults, and measuring how and why devices perform in the real world. This requires us to address fundamental issues in modelling, instrumentation and data processing.
A warm welcome to new group members Becky Perriment, Zihao Zhou and Masaki Adachi who arrived in October and will respectively be working on solar-battery off-grid systems, lifetime modelling, and machine learning. We were sad to say goodbye to Dr Jie Lin in September who has moved to take up a new position at UCL. You can read about Jie’s exciting research on coupled thermal-electrochemical modelling here.
Huge congratulations to Trishna Raj who successfully defended her doctoral work on battery aging, investigating ‘path dependence’ in aging. Can we just combine calendar aging and cyclic aging data? Not always. Read more about this topic in Trishna’s excellent Batteries & Supercaps paper, and download the associated experimental data too.
This month we welcome Dr Volkan Kumtepeli who is joining the group as a postdoc, working on the Energy Superhub Oxford project. Volkan will be continuing to build our ‘digital twin’ battery model that enables simulations of large scale energy storage systems, including degradation. Check out the code for this on github.
We were delighted that Luis and Antti’s paper on battery parameter estimation won a best paper award at the recent ASME DSCC! Also, check out Antti’s other DSCC paper, on extracting battery SOH from live data, as well as work by Jie on thermal models given at ECS Prime (‘virtually’ Hawaii!). A very warm welcome to Dr Nicola Courtier and to Adam Lewis-Douglas, a new DPhil (doctoral) student in the group, both of them are affiliated with the Faraday Institution. Sad goodbyes to Dr Jorn Reniers (now at Brill Power) and Dr Pedro Ascencio (who has moved back to Chile to work in industry); they will be very sorely missed.
After a last minute change of plan due to the spread of Covid, we successfully ran OBMS this year as an online event, welcoming 150 attendees. This was so well received that a weekly webinar series has also begun, building on the momentum from OBMS. Read more about all of it in this ACS Article. We hope OBMS will be back in 2021.