HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — We've heard about electric vehicles in recent years. In six years, a little more than 26 million of those EVs are projected to be on the roads in the U.S. alone. But, are they safe? One UAH Professor was awarded a grant for research on safety measures and sat down with FOX54 about the process.
UAH Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Abimanyu Sahoo is apart of a team of researchers awarded 279K grant to study ways to enhance the safety, efficiency and longevity of lithium-ion battery packs in electric vehicles. "See, the interesting thing is this the batteries, if you look into the literature or the research of what is going on, they are perfectly safe. What exactly the researchers are looking at on the batteries, the new development in batteries, we are trying to, the main concern, if you look into the other users, how far it can go. and the second concern is safety."
Sahoo added that one thing to note is that safety is already taken care of. "Otherwise you will not get approval from the agencies. so now our goal here, from my research perspective is how can we elongate the life of the the pack because that's the most expensive part in a vehicle, electric vehicle."
An EV battery pack consists of a bunch of cells, more than hundreds of them, and the whole idea of this research is taking action before a malfunction ever occurs. "So if I write a program that can tell me how the battery is going to behave in future, I can technically predict it, how that behavior happens. So that'll help me monitor each cell. When I say that I can predict, obviously I have time for maintenance, I can do maintenance that increases further safety. I can trigger on my thermal management system."
At the end of the day, Sahoo explained that things are already being implemented on EVs for use of safety, but the overall goal of this research is preventing any malfunctions in the long run. "We are trying to enhance a little further so that we try to make that number to zero in some other way in future."