Initial Brainstorming
- Rodrigo Tiscareno
- Jeyoung Park
- Prabhav Khera
Brainstorming Dump
Idea | Notes | Group Discussion | Owner |
|---|---|---|---|
Coulomb Counting for capacity of battery | Will address the “How much energy left in the pack?” question. We could have rate of capacity decrease indicator. The difference between what we are getting from the sun and energy we are using. Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) for Coulomb Counting - Mechanical - Confluence (atlassian.net) | Critical Metric to usage, input and energy. Explore rate of capacity decrease indicator. | Battery |
Predictive Performance | Based on our current state of charge, can forecast how our performance will adapt to present/future conditions? We could have a changing value of the steepest incline we could climb (this value will go down as the voltage of the pack decreases) | Related to the above. Strategy projects will mostly cover this, but there might be overlap with the Sun Power team. | Backlogged |
Dashboard Monitoring Telemetry Data (tied to dashboard) | Similar to Telemetry monitoring, a dashboard is needed to monitor battery levels, changes, and conditions. Can we receive live data from the battery pack in an effective way? | Critical Work with hardware to figure out telemetry exchange. | Strategy |
Battery Performance | Testing the battery’s reception to solar energy and optimizing performance/monitoring performance. Kinda broad but can help answer questions regarding cell placement, cell traction, battery optimization etc. | Over, under -voltage, current for each module. Send feedback to chase vehicle (could be part of telemetry) | Battery |
Active cooling system optimization? | Decide whether we would rather crank up the fans or run the car at a lower speed (and rely more on passive cooling)? idrk how the fans work rn lol also need to run car to maintain a safe temperature for the battery pack (in addition to not drawing out too much power) | Optimizing the cooling system. If energy effects are negligible, we leave it out of scope of the team. However if requires relevant energy consumption, it becomes a SUN POWER issue. | Battery |
Solar Array Testing | Analyze the exact effects of weather conditions on the battery pack. Answer the following questions: “ How much energy do we receive from x weather condition? “ “ How much energy are we expected to receive from x future conditions? “ “ What is the correlation of the efficiency of our cells and weather conditions? “ | Critical Spring 2023 project (require in-person members) Pack not expected to be complete by project start, so funding needs to be explored. (Need specifications: solar board? etc.) | Strategy |
Optimizing Performance | How can we increase/decrease speed or other conditions to use the battery power most optimally? Maybe some kind of code where we can input conditions and it tells us how fast we want to be driving or smth I think that is essentially the optimization project we wanna work on to find the optimal speed of the car in set time intervals . | Backlogged - currently being addressed in some Strat models - we can share results. | Backlogged |
Solar Power Conversion | From theoretical energy to percentage in actually battery capacity. | Update solar power input with new car’s specs, more functions can be added Current code is not accurate - we don’t know the formula and data we should use for energy conversion. Uses angles and time intervals to convert the energy input to usable, battery capacity and factor into Coloumb Counting | Strategy |
Battery Module Testing |
| Prototype module being developed.
Route model tied to these decisions. | Battery |
Real-time energy calculation based on Lat-Lon | Calculate energy profile based on location and specific time of the day. | “Naturalizing” based on time, weather, and current conditions based on lat, long.
Energy Profile: Shows upcoming energy levels based on weather, sun angles etc. | Strategy |
Battery Type Testing |
| Future project: Testing of batteries given sample data for future models. Variance in cell capacity - not good to have huge variance - need to find cells with similar capacities. Lots of computation involved - may need scripts. | If time permits, any team. |