Mahfuz Kamal
Recovering energy from recycling of Li-ion batteries.
- Email: m.m.kamal@ncl.ac.uk
Supervisor
Project description
There is an international trend towards greener transport. This trend has led to exponential growth in electric and hybrid-electric vehicles (EVs and HEVs). This will result in significant penetration of EV and HEV drivetrains in vehicle fleets.
When the vehicles reach end of life (EoL), regulations specify that they are recycled in an environmentally friendly way. This includes recycling the Li-ion battery pack. There will be significant volumes of these as EV and HEV vehicle fleets increase in size.
Before recycling, the batteries must be discharged to a low state of charge (SoC) to minimise the risk of faults. Current methods for discharge are wasteful and labour intensive. We are exploring the possibility of recovering the residual energy and feeding it back into the electricity network. This would open a possible revenue stream. We will discharge the batteries at a high C-rate, to reduce the processing time. The C-rate specifies the rate of discharge.
We are investigating the novel application of high-gain DC-DC converters with intelligent multi-input sorting,. They will able to process several tens of cells at a time, for the rapid and efficient discharge of battery cells.
Interests
- high gain DC-DC converters
- cell balancing
- BMS (Battery Management Systems)
- battery modelling
- nature inspired algorithms
Qualifications
- BEng Electrical and Electronic Engineering (Newcastle University)