Career Fair and Career Events

Paul Gasper

National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Faculty host: Uday Pal

Student host: Michelle Sugimoto

MSE Talks Website: www.bu.edu/eng/msetalks

Title: Using machine-learning for lithium-ion battery state-of-health diagnosis, prediction, and optimization.

Abstract:

Wide-scale adoption of lithium-ion batteries for use in electric vehicles and as stationary energy storage is rapidly transforming the global energy economy. One critical aspect of the long-term economics of these battery systems is their lifetime. Battery lifetime presents many challenges at all levels of the battery industry, from R&D up to control of existing systems. These challenges can be roughly broken up into three tasks: 1) Diagnosis – How can we measure state-of-health quickly in real-world systems, 2) Prediction – How can we extrapolate existing lab or field data forward in time to predict future performance, and 3) Optimization – How can we adapt battery dispatch to extend system lifetime. In this talk, several examples using statistical modeling and machine-learning techniques that address these battery lifetime prediction challenges from published and on-going works are presented.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Paul Gasper is currently a Researcher at the National Renewable Energy Lab. Paul’s interest in electrochemistry began during an undergraduate research internship at Worcester Polytechnic Institute on the recycling of lithium-ion batteries. Paul earned an MS in materials science at WPI, and a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering at Boston University. His focus was in electrochemistry, excited about the role that electrochemical energy generation and storage systems might have in the carbon-free energy economy of the future. Before starting his Ph.D., Paul spent a year working at Saint-Gobain on solid oxide fuels cells, earning valuable experience in the difficulty of industrial ceramics manufacturing. Paul conducted his Ph.D. research at BU advised by Profs. Pal, Basu, and Gopalan, studying the modification and performance characterization of solid oxide fuel cells. Dr. Gasper then joined NREL as a post-doctoral researcher in the fall of 2019, jumping head-first into the rapidly growing field of lithium-ion battery modeling.