Free Battery Software May Free Battery Designers

Dean Sigler Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

Your editor used to teach a class on technical writing.   One of its premises was that good technical writing should be so clear it helps us see the error of our ways.  If the knights in Monty Python and the Holy Grail had done a brief description and a few simple drawings before catapulting cows over their enemy’s walls, they might have realized that they had supplied bovine bombs for the enemy to catapult back. To avoid similar defeats on the stored energy front, engineers at Washington University in St. Louis have cooked up a Cliff’s Notes of how different battery chemistries will behave when being charged.  This “back of the envelope calculation,” as Venkat Subramanian, PhD, associate professor of energy, environmental & chemical engineering and his team think of it, is an early predictor of success. Best of all, “The team developed a freely available code that battery developers can use as a model to determine the optimal profile …