UC Merced Team Wins International EV Design Competition

Imagine driving down a road in an electric vehicle with no charging stations in sight. Do you want only an estimate of how many more miles your car can go before the battery dies?

As electric vehicles proliferate throughout much of the world, it's never been more important to know precisely how much charge is left in their batteries.

A team from UC Merced came up with a cost-effective technique to measure how much life remains in a car battery. For this, the team earned first place in this year's internationalIEEE Transportation Electrification Council Electric Vehicle Design Competition.

Dilawer Ali, a Fulbright Ph.D. scholar from Pakistan, along with Adan De Le Cueva Perez, and Fan Yang of Hong Kong Poly comprised the team, advised by UC Merced electrical engineering and electrical engineering Professor Eric Cheng.

"When you are driving, if you don't know how much charge is left, it is quite annoying," said Dilawer, who led the team. "You're driving on a highway, and you get stuck. It could be embarrassing."

The team wanted their measurement to be specific and accurate. Commonly used techniques can only estimate how much charge remains.

"But that might give an error, and the errors could accumulate," Dilawer said. "What we are doing is using an ultrasonic sensor, which is a noninvasive technique that doesn't bother the battery."

Once the raw data is retrieved from the ultrasonic signal, it is processed in a way they can understand to show how much charge is left in the battery.

Similar high-accuracy sensors used can be very expensive, Ali said. His team got the data with low-cost, non-invasive sensor equipment.

Dilawer said the win, in a competition that drew teams from around the world, indicates UC Merced's increasing strength in world-changing research. The team was awarded a certificate as well as a cash prize.

"It's an honor to be among the top dogs," he said.

Dilawer also expressed gratitude to the Fulbright Program for sponsoring his doctoral studies at UC Merced, and said he was thrilled to be at an esteemed university that is making significant contributions to electric vehicle research.

It's particularly rewarding when the goal is to improve a product that people use, rather than just serving as an academic exercise, he said.

"The research I'm doing is really impacting the world."