ECE graduate students win battery algorithm competition

A team of University of Wisconsin-Madison electrical and computer engineering PhD students has won first place in the 2022 IEEE/AIAA ITEC+EATS Battery State of Charge Estimation Student Competition.

The world is slowly but surely switching to electric vehicles to help combat climate change. But the battery systems powering those vehicles still have some issues to work out. For instance, it is not possible to directly measure things like the state of charge, state of power or internal temperature of the batteries with sensors. Instead, those properties are estimated by models. But things like load dynamics and varying environments can make it hard to produce accurate models.

In the competition, students were tasked with developing new algorithms to estimate the state of charge of a lithium-ion battery. The algorithm was then tested against a high-quality dataset of Li-ion battery characterization and drive cycle test data over a wide range of temperatures.

The UW-Madison team’s submission, called “A multi-layer perceptron based battery SoC estimator,” estimated the charge of the battery with a weighted error rate of just 2.3%.

The $750 award was presented at the ITEC/EATS conference in Anaheim, California, in June 2022. Team members included Varsha Pendyala, Sangwhee Lee, Nishanth, Shalini Manna and Nathan Peterson.