ubramanian says.
"The goal of the AMPED program is to push the current technology to 100-percent efficiency, while making sure battery lifetime is not compromised," Subramanian says. This would ultimately reduce the weight of the car and improve its energy efficiency.
Revving up the models
"If you can predict what will happen inside the battery, you can push the battery to do more per cycle," Subramanian says. "Currently empirical (experience based) models that have no predictive capability are used to manage the batteries. This is why manufacturers over-stack the material; they have no idea what's happening inside."
There are physics-based models of lithium-ion batteries but they are computationally intensive and can't be solved in real time by the usual methods.
This is where the MAPLE lab comes in. The engineers plan to use a class of simulation techniques called spectral methods aided by mathematical analysis to solve a physics-based model's differential equations. Spectral methods should allow them to cut down on the model's computational demands so that it runs faster.
The Battery Management System (BMS), MAPLE lab develop will keep the battery operating optimally, enabling maximum utilization of energy at all times.
"In general," Subramanian says, "people write mathematical models and then plug them into commercial software to solve them. We relish solving the models ourselves to see if we can find more elegant ways to do it. That's the overarching theme of our work.
"We are also interested in re-examining predictive models of importance for medicine, such as those used in medical imaging, to see if we can solve them faster but with the same accuracy so that they can be used in real-time sensing and control," he says.
Modeled on the Defense Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA), famous for its daring funding decisions, ARPA-E was launched in 2009 to seek out breakthrough techno
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| Contact: Diana Lutz dlutz@wustl.edu 314-935-5272 Washington University in St. Louis Source:Eurekalert |
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