Swaminathan Narayanaswamy

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

SKILLS

ABOUT SWAMINATHAN NARAYANASWAMY

Have you ever thought why can’t an EV battery pack be built like installing the batteries of a remote control? This is the question that I answer in my research work for the past eight years. I have been working on modular battery systems and have developed multiple concepts for plug-and-play integration of high power EV battery packs. The main component that is limiting the required scalability of a battery pack is the BMS that is responsible for maintaining safe operation and extending the driving range. Current BMSs are tailored to the application requirements and therefore does not provide full scalability. As a result, BMS designed for one series of an EV cannot be used for another series even from the same OEM, resulting in significant design effort driving up the cost and time-to-market. My research tackles this problem and is focused on developing a scalable, cost-effective battery system. Instead of designing a new BMS for each application, I focused on making the individual battery cells more smart by adding intelligent controllers at cell-level. These smart cell-level controllers maintain the operation within safe limits and in addition also communicate with each other to perform the system-level BMS functions in a distributed fashion. Benefit: If each battery cell can manage its own operating limits, then we do not need a centralized BMS to take care of the battery pack. As an OEM, I would simply buy the required number of smart battery cells and connect them depending upon the energy and power requirements and voila the battery pack is formed that works out of the box. This kind of customization-free integration significantly reduces the cost of an EV and also improves the controlling capability of the battery pack. Moreover, with increased monitoring capability it is possible to use cheap battery cells to build the battery pack achieving the same level of performance at a significantly lower cost. Energy Storage Systems (ESS): EVs are proliferating the market world-wide. Wondered what will happen to the batteries in the EVs after they retire? Are we going to recycle them for raw materials? What is economical and also environmentally friendly? I answer the above questions in my research where I am developing a cost-effective approach for reusing retired EV battery packs. I have developed an energy transfer architecture for directly reusing the retired batteries along with their existing control systems, thereby significantly minimizing the cost and time-to-market of an application.