Electric vehicle project on battery health

The goal of our capstone projects at the end of an electric vehicle training program is to make learners go through the reality of EV design today. By undertaking an innovation project that improves on the existing EV technology, they learn to come up with the required specifications and figure out how to make it work better.  

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In this post, we share with you one such innovative electric vehicle engineering project that has the potential to be brought to market as part of the latest cutting-edge EV technology to be implemented in the next generation of electric vehicles. 

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This is a project by Vaishak Moorkoth, a pManifold evACAD learner who recently completed his EV technology training. Vaishak has developed a virtual prototype of an electric vehicle dashboard indicator that shows the number of charging cycles your battery has gone through, and the state of health of the battery.

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Video transcript: As a reference. And I'm just trying to implement a feature where the battery charging cycles are being counted now because the lot of battery, because the lithiumion technologies, the battery packs are designed to sustain for a certain number of cycles when it goes through a charging and discharging phenomena. So what I'm trying to do is because psychologically, humans, it's a fast moving world. Everyone wants to fast charge and move, but the impacts of a fast charge on the battery pack would basically degrade it faster than it is designed to. 

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So in order for the driver and the owner to have a visual indication of how many charging cycles they have accomplished and what is the state of health of the battery right now. And is he treating the battery pack in a good way by always trying to fast charge it, even if it's not necessary, even if the battery packs are being fast charged, rather where he could use some AC slow charging. 

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All of this is my idea is to visually indicate this on the instrument cluster and show how the charging cycles and the methods of charging being implemented by the driver and the owner, how is it affecting the battery health and how fast is it degrading the battery is what my concept was all about. 

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And, yeah, I've been getting very good insights from Mr. Vikrant Vaidya. I started off from scratch, I shared with him my idea. And the very first thing that I didn't know, actually, where to start from because I just had a rough idea and how to start. The logic. Where should I start? It's basically about all numbers. Where should I start from? So it's like he gave me a very good target approach towards my project. On this is where you are going to start from. This is the state of charge of the battery, and this is what the duty cycles are going to be. And this is what is your initial state. This is what your target is going to be, and this is how your approach should be. And that has helped me a lot to evaluate my project calculations and come up to a point where I'm making some sense now that my logic is going to improve the state of health of the battery and make its life even more, and I deliver a higher life within the battery pack rather than what it is designed to. If the logic is being implemented. 

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So one question we have from our participants. Do you think Tata will buy your project? Like a very useful addition. I'm not sure about that. I still had the same question with Mr. Vikrant Vaidya. It's been leaked already. You know about it now, so no, I'm just joking. I'm not sure it's a concept that came to me, but I think if they would I'd be happy to…I would be happy to let Tata have my project. And then I'm not sure how that works, but I'll have to get in touch with Mr. Vikrant. I think he has some connections with Tata Motors and all. Yes. I mean, if they want to implement a feature like this, I'd be the happiest person.