Future Energy Storage System: A Bridge between Transportation and Power Systems

Abstract: Electric vehicles (EVs) and renewable energy play a crucial role in addressing the pressing challenges of climate change and transitioning towards a more sustainable energy future. Both EVs and renewable energy systems rely on advanced energy storage solutions, such as batteries, supercapacitors, and flywheels. Efficient energy storage is particularly vital for enhancing the range and performance of electrified vehicles, making them more practical and appealing to consumers. In power systems, energy storage contributes to grid stabilization by balancing supply and demand, mitigating fluctuations, and ensuring a reliable and resilient energy supply.

This talk will focus on how to strategically utilize energy storage systems as a bridge to seamlessly connect transportation and power systems, thereby mitigating the environmental impact of transportation, promoting energy independence, and driving technological advancements. Specifically, this talk will focus on several key topics. Firstly, hybrid energy storage systems (HESS) emerge as promising solutions for electrified vehicles, ships, and smart grids by combining the advantages of various storage systems. An integrated design framework for HESS will be introduced, highlighting the necessity of a multi-dimensional co-design process. Secondly, battery management systems (BMS) are crucial due to their direct impact on battery efficiency, safety, and performance. Traditional BMS either focuses on battery models or estimation algorithms, but this talk will introduce how data informativeness significantly impacts the battery parameter/state estimation performance, and an advanced algorithm that can actively inject informative signals will be presented. Moreover, initiatives involving the exploration of advanced sensors, physics-informed machine learning, and novel power electronics structures for next-generation BMS will be introduced. Lastly, ongoing work on integrating heterogeneous EVs into power systems and assessing the feasibility of reusing second-life batteries with ensured lifetime and economic benefits will be discussed.

Bio: Dr. Ziyou Song is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He earned his bachelor’s degree with honors and Ph.D. degree with the highest honors in Automotive Engineering from Tsinghua University, China, in 2011 and 2016, respectively. After graduation, he served as a Research Scientist at Tsinghua University from 2016 to 2017, and a Research Fellow at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, from 2017 to 2019, where he was also an Assistant Research Scientist and Lecturer from 2019 to 2020. Before his tenure at NUS, Dr. Song worked as a Battery Algorithm Engineer at Apple, Cupertino, US. In this role, he was responsible for overseeing battery management systems for audio products such as AirPods Pro 2. Dr. Song’s research focuses on modeling, estimation, optimization, and control of energy storage systems, especially for the electrified transportation sector. Dr. Song has received several paper awards, including Automotive Innovation Best Paper Award, Applied Energy Highly Cited Paper Award, Applied Energy Award for Most Cited Energy Article from China, NSK Outstanding Paper Award of Mechanical Engineering, and IEEE VPPC Best Student Paper Award. Dr. Song serves as an Associate Editor and Editorial Member for IEEE Transactions on Transportation Electrification, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles, Applied Energy, and eTransportation, among others.