MAE student Daniel Seals' NSF poster wins first place at ASME IMECE 2021

Ohio State master’s student Daniel Seals has won first place for his National Science Foundation poster in the Research Experience for Undergraduates category at American Society of Mechanical Engineer’s International Mechanical Engineering Congress & Exposition 2021, a virtual event held Nov. 1-5.

Seals is currently a graduate research associate at the Center for Automotive Research. His first-place research presentation was titled “Electrochemistry-Based Equivalent Circuity Model via Model Approximation”.

The presentation was a one-minute video presentation of Seals’ poster and research, which was put in a virtual booth at IMECE. This poster presentation was based off the research that Seals, an undergraduate at the time, submitted in April 2021 for his NSF-funded undergraduate honors research thesis.

According to Seals, his research focused on linking two types of widely-used battery modeling techniques, physics-based electrochemical models and empirical Equivalent Circuit Models (ECMs).

Electrochemical battery models are typically very accurate and do not require a lot of testing to calibrate, but are mathematically and computationally complex. ECMs are the opposite. They are computationally efficient, but require tests across many different experimental conditions to calibrate accurately, which increases the development time and cost of electric vehicles for automakers.

To combine these two and get the best parts of both, Seals developed a method to use an already-calibrated electrochemical model to define the ECM parameters to create an electrochemistry-based ECM, or E-ECM. This eliminated the extra testing usually needed to calibrate ECMs.

Additionally, the E-ECM still has the physical aspect of the electrochemical model, which allows for other physics-based phenomena to be incorporated into the E-ECM, an opportunity not available to traditional ECMs.

Seals felt honored to be recognized for his work and looks forward to continuing his research career.

“Standing on an international stage among peers was an honor; to be recognized for the quality of my work and presentation was the last thing I expected,” Seals said. “I’m proud of what I was able to accomplish in my undergraduate research, and this recognition further validates all the hard work put into making it happen. More than anything, I’m thankful to my research group and especially my advisor Dr. Canova for guiding me through my first research experience.”