In this project, we will design an innovative, modular, and scalable BMS for a wide range of vehicles, from small passenger cars to electric buses and trucks, offering improved performance, connectivity, security, and reliability.

This aims to enhance battery performance and reduce the total cost of ownership in electric vehicle applications and smart battery usage for grid support and second-life applications, based on a holistic design of an interoperable architecture, supported by a suite of advanced sensors, and cloud computing capabilities. 

The project has a total budget of over 6M€ and will last for 42 months. The consortium consists of 11 European partners.

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This project aims to deepen a collaboration network to investigate control-oriented models for proton exchange membrane water electrolyzers and collect, analyze, and develop data-driven aging models for a large-scale alkaline electrolysis system. This system, integrated with renewable energy sources and the power grid, will be installed at UNICAMP, with an additional real system to be installed at THI. Additionally, models will be developed to estimate the Remaining Useful Life (RUL), monitor the efficiency of electrolyzers considering aging, detect safety failures, and identify maintenance needs.

The project will see the establishment of a cutting-edge joint research laboratory at Fotovoltaica Lab. on UFSC's Florianópolis campus, focusing on repurposing lithium-ion batteries from electric vehicles, producing green hydrogen, and fostering a strong German-Brazilian network with partners from research, industry, and politics. 

Electric vehicles are a promising means of transport, as they are less polluting than conventional vehicles.  However, the high cost of batteries makes electric vehicles less attractive financially compared to traditional vehicles. For this reason, there is a need for research to reduce the cost of batteries and make their application in real scenarios possible. One of the alternatives for reducing the cost of batteries is reuse, that is, using batteries in a second application.  This   reuse   consists of   reusing the deactivated batteries of electric vehicles in less demanding applications, such as in applications connected to the grid, to increase the electrical power system's efficiency, stability, and reliability.   An energy storage system must meet environmental, safety, and performance requirements. Therefore, this project proposes to raise the state of the art of the reuse of lithium batteries using a comparison regarding the leading technologies developed, their advantages and disadvantages, the main types of energy management systems, the quantification of the environmental impacts obtained through the reuse of batteries, the costs and technical and economic feasibility of reusing batteries.

Highlights

• Reusing Li-ion batteries is expected to be better than recycling. This is because the recycling process, at the current stage of maturation, is still expensive, is not geographically distributed, and cannot recycle the large volume of batteries expected in the coming years. Lithium-ion batteries also have a variety of chemicals that can make Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) reluctant to invest in battery recycling projects because the chemicals and battery design, in general, change constantly.

• Some opportunities for OEMs can be cited, including (i) Postponement of the recycling phase, (ii) Use of the remaining capacity of EV batteries, (iii) Batteries safe enough to handle a second application, Increased battery life, (iv) Reduction of the resource exploitation rate, and (v) OEMs will be able to design batteries that will be incompatible with earlier or later versions between new and old components within the product package will lead each vehicle to necessarily have a new and specified battery for that type of vehicle.

• The reuse of second-life batteries allows companies to capture value and increase their revenues in different ways, such as (i) by reducing the cost of electric vehicles, (ii) by improving the charging infrastructure of electric vehicles, (iii) by reducing the cost of operating and maintaining energy concessionaires and (iv) by postponing the recycling phase.
  
  I am currently engaged in various projects focusing on second-life batteries, such as 2LifeBat (a German-Brazil project) and initiatives from the collaboration between UNICAMP and companies in the energy sector.

Technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), data processing, and blockchain have allowed companies to serve their customers with better quality, efficiency, and reliability in the shortest possible time. The growing adoption of electric vehicles on the market has increased the demand for batteries that may have numerous manufacturers. The supply chain for electric vehicle batteries is very complex. It involves everything from retrieving raw materials for battery manufacturing to the second-life batteries and their disposal. Batteries come from different parts of the world, belong to various citizens and companies, experience heterogeneous operational conditions, and have different life expectancies. Many parameters have a role in battery health, and thousands of data must be evaluated and consulted. The present work investigates the scenario of the battery industry to implement a blockchain-based platform for supply chain implementation, thus allowing better control of the performance of batteries and environmental impact. This system can achieve greater transparency in the supply chain: production, reuse, recycling, and disposal. Transparency and traceability prevent clandestine markets, misuse, and release of pollutants.

I am working on this project as part of my Ph.D. in collaboration with a company in the energy sector. 

The fuel production ecosystem (from extracting long-chain hydrocarbons to distributing and retailing fuels) comprises numerous companies and intermediaries. A common problem in the transportation sector is related to the millions of liters of fuel that are stolen, as well as miscalculations and mismanagement of a valuable and scarce resource. It is tough to estimate the damage of these illicit activities to companies. The damage can be divided into four significant areas: economic, political, technical, and environmental. These frauds are complex to identify and eliminate because they can involve different parties with conflicts of interest and sometimes internal company employees. These issues can be addressed through a distributed IoT system that tracks fuel efficiently. This system can encompass the entire fuel production and retail ecosystem, encouraging and increasing the product credibility of gas station networks and independent gas stations. This system will eliminate illicit activity and will inhibit the spread of this activity to various gas stations. Estimating, reducing, and keeping fuel prices constant will also be possible, preventing a price from being charged for fuel of questionable quality. Avoiding fuel adulteration is directly related to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and environmental impacts. That's because adulterated fuel emits more greenhouse gases and particulate matter than unadulterated fuels.  Furthermore, contaminated fuel increases the need for greater oil extraction, reducing a scarce and valuable resource.

The transport sector is one of the main contributors to a country's carbon emissions. Among the modes of transport, there is transport by locomotives, which is a source of greenhouse gas emissions, as well as emissions of atmospheric pollutants such as NOx and PM. In addition to sustainability, fuel thefts are frequent in operating locomotives. Approximately 150 225 liters of fuel are stolen from rail transport in the Swedish market. This fuel theft of the direct impacts of fuel theft, indirect impacts are reported as: (i) delay in product delivery, (ii) need to tow the locomotive, (iii) financial losses. Fuel can account for more than 25% of a railway's total operating cost. The Blockchain-based platform has a broad scope and aims to record and integrate data making it available to the engineering, quality, supply chain, and operational teams. Thus, data recording on this platform will be done by operators from different sectors, from the locomotive driver to strategic levels. 

The PRIMA project aims to develop a digital twin of a battery, for real-time battery control, recording the relevant battery data in a cloud solution. The solution proposed in the PRIMA project has the main objective of predicting the maintenance of batteries, it also allows monitoring and control of the battery in real-time. He has experience in developing blockchain applications, battery modeling, battery real-time control, high fidelity models, machine learning, digital twins, lithium-ion batteries, signal processing, battery simulation, and applied artificial intelligence to solve various problems (36 months). The consortium consists of 3 companies and one research institute.

The aim of the project is to set up a research network in the area of ​​solar-powered storage systems based on second-life batteries from the automotive sector. These storage solutions can be used primarily in the remote areas that have no power connection, and are therefore particularly suitable for settlements in the Amazon area. For the development of such systems, a number of multidisciplinary research questions, such as the remaining life, system reliability or economic and ecological potential, must be solved. For this purpose, an existing cooperation between THI and UFSC is used and reinforced by other Brazilian and German universities. Click here for more details 

The main objective of this proposal is to develop methodologies for the application of statistical signal processing (PES) to Smart Grids. Among the statistical signal processing tools, the Principal Component Analysis (PCA - Principal Component Analysis), Independent Component Analysis (ICA - Independent Component Analysis) and Higher-order Statistics (HOS - Higher-order) techniques will be explored in this proposal. Statistics). These tools have in common the good ability to: (i) handle large data; (ii) extracting relevant (usually hidden) information from electrical signals; (iii) decompose signals into isolated components; (iv) estimating parameters and (v) designing adaptive filters. The methodologies to be developed will focus on application in the so-called smart grids, or Smart Grids, in a context of distributed generation (GD). Smart grids must have a set of basic functions that allow the modernization of the electrical infrastructure, among which the following stand out: (1) self-reconfiguration capacity; (2) be fault tolerant, resisting hacker attacks; (3) enable the integration of all energy source and storage options; (4) allow dynamic optimization of network operation; (5) allow the active participation of consumers; and (6) improving the reliability, power quality, safety and efficiency of the power system. Some of these functions are obviously not new, as the energy infrastructure has always relied on intelligent technologies for its operation, control and protection, etc., but in this new scenario of great penetration of distributed and dispersed generation, it will be necessary to make efforts in research and in the development of new technologies to solve the problems that are already beginning to appear on the networks. In this context, the main contributions of this project are: (i) the development of a system for classifying the causes of voltage sags; (ii) development of an islanding detection system; (iii) development of a method for extracting harmonic, subharmonic and interharmonic components and (iv) the proposal of a methodology for signal compression.

This project addresses the problem of power quality (EQ) in the current scenario characterized by the strong penetration of solar and wind energy in the context of Smart Grids. In this new scenario of great penetration of distributed and dispersed generation, it will be necessary to make efforts in research and in the development of new technologies to solve the problems that are already beginning to appear in the networks. In this sense, the general objective of this project is to develop and improve advanced techniques for statistical signal processing and computational intelligence for three purposes: (1) extraction of harmonics, interharmonics and subharmonics; (2) segmentation and classification of the causes of voltage dips; and (3) detection and classification of new PQ disorders. Regarding purpose (1), the techniques known as principal component analysis (PCA) and independent component analysis (ICA) will be improved and applied in comparison with the works in the literature and the advances already made by the project team. Regarding purpose (2), the ICA technique will be applied to segment voltage sags and higher order statistics (EOS) along with neural networks will be applied to identify the causes of voltage sags. In purpose (3), techniques involving concepts such as cognition, adaptability and evolution in PQ monitoring will be applied for the purpose of detecting and classifying novelties (new PQ phenomena). The methods will be tested on simulated and real signals via MatLab. It is expected to implement them in FPGA and LabView.

The general objective of this proposal is to develop an Automated Rotary Manufacturing Cell (ACM) applied to the concrete tile manufacturing process of an industrial client, which replaces the manual process of stacking raw tiles, transporting them to the curing oven, controlling the humidity and temperature of the oven, and unstacking them after the curing process. The studies were guided by the modeling of structures and mechanical parts using computer-aided design (CAD) software, electrical diagrams, process and instrumentation diagrams, PLC programming for the manufacturer Allen Bradley, development of supervisory systems using Studio 5000, patent writing, technical documentation for the requesting partner company and reports, among other activities. Start: 12/2014 End: 05/2017