Units

Department of control engineering and system analysis

The research activities of the SAAS group are essentially oriented in two directions:
- Supervision and fault diagnosis of technical systems based on mathematical models
- Advanced control of nonlinear dynamic system subject to constraints, with emphasis on reference governor methods
 
The developed methods are applied to a wide range of areas including:
- Electric energy production, distribution and storage
- Mechatronics (UAVs and robotics)
- Industrial processes

Projetcs

Optimization and monitoring of environmetally friendly battery packs

The project aims at developing safer, long lasting and environmentally
friendly lithium ion batteries for use in stationary storage applications. The
targeted batteries are made of LTO/LFP electrode materials coated onto
current collectors via a novel aqueous preparation pathway. These 
chemistries are indeed known to be more stable and safer than others.
However, there is no guarantee that the manufactured battery is the safest
or the one with the best performance among different possible designs.
Moreover, currently there is no way to track the progression of its internal
state as the battery is operated. These two issues can be addressed
through the combination of electrochemistry, mathematical modelling and
control theory, three domains of expertise covered by the two partners.
Three lines of research will be pursued: the optimal design of a battery cell,
the study and modelling of aging for such a cell, and the state monitoring of
a battery pack. The battery design optimization seeks to improve the
battery performance through appropriate sizing. The associated challenges
include the choice of relevant design criteria and degrees of freedom to be
optimized. The optimized battery design will be experimentally validated by
building the cell and verifying the resulting performance index. The aging
model will exploit long term cycling experiments to determine aging as a
function of the operating conditions. Such information will be used in the
battery pack state monitoring system that aims at estimating the state-of
charge and state-of-health of the constituent battery cells. These packs
arise when series/parallel arrangements of cells are considered in order to
meet voltage/power requirements.