People

TA Office Hours

Held weekly in the senior design lab (ECEB 2070/2072). NOTE:

Blue names are office hours held online via zoom.

Names highlighted in orange are additional office hours available up to the due date of the soldering assignment.

There are no office hours during the weeks of board reviews or final demos.

Chat Room

Ask technical questions here:

Matrix: #uiucece445:matrix.org
Discord
IRC: #uiucece445 on libera.chat

Summer 2024 Instructors

	Name	Area
	Prof. Arne Fliflet (Instructor) 3056 afliflet@illinois.edu	microwave generation and applications
	Prof. Viktor Gruev (Instructor) vgruev@illinois.edu
	Prof. Rakesh Kumar (Instructor) rakeshk@illinois.edu
	Prof. Olga Mironenko (Instructor) olgamiro@illinois.edu
	Prof. Michael Oelze (Instructor) ECEB 2056 oelze@illinois.edu	Biomedical Imaging, Acoustics, Nondestructive Testing
	Prof. Jonathon Schuh (Instructor) 4066 ECEB schuh4@illinois.edu	Computational Physics, Electromechanics, Fluid Mechanics, Energy Storage, Tribology
	Prof. Victoria Shao (Instructor) yangshao@illinois.edu
	Nikhil Arora (TA) na32@illinois.edu	Mechanical Design, Automotive Technologies, Additive Manufacturing
	Sainath Barbhai (TA) barbhai2@illinois.edu	Design Engineering, Finite Element Method, Sensors and Actuators
	Zutai Chen (TA) zutaic2@illinois.edu
	Zicheng Ma (TA) zicheng5@illinois.edu	Cloud computing, Database systems
	Abhisheka Mathur Sekar (TA) am113@illinois.edu	Mechanical Engineering, Design, CAD Modelling and Simulation, Fluid Mechanics, MRI, Human centric designs
	David Null (TA) null2@illinois.edu	Robotics, Computer Vision, Navigation, Coordinated Systems, Control Systems.
	Jason Paximadas (TA) jop2@illinois.edu	Power electronics, control, and instrumentation
	Sanjana Pingali (TA) pingali4@illinois.edu	Machine Learning Systems
	Nithin Balaji Shanthini Praveena Purushothaman (TA) ns49@illinois.edu	My area of interest include Mechanical Design, Design Analysis, Supply Chain(Circular), Industry 4.0, Data Science and RPA.
	Koushik Udayachandran (TA) koushik3@illinois.edu	Unmanned aerial vehicles. Risk assesment. Autonomous underwater vehicles . Aircraft design. Systems engineering and integration . Flight testing
	Surya Vasanth (TA) vasanth4@illinois.edu	Data Science and Analytics, Internet of Things, Human Centric Design
	Angquan Yu (TA) angquan2@illinois.edu
	Douglas Yu (TA) zeduoyu2@illinois.edu	Hardware Design, Computer Architecture, AI
	Jason Zhang (TA) zekaiz2@illinois.edu	AR, Robot and human interactions
	Jialiang Zhang (TA) CSL 403 jz23@illinois.edu	Hardware Systems, Computer Architecture
	Tianxiang Zheng (TA) tz32@illinois.edu	FPGA hls and mlir; Chronic signal processing; robotics and control; 3D printing;

Other Important People

https://ece.illinois.edu/about/directory/staff

Featured Project

# Problem

Illini Solar Car (ISC) utilizes lithium ion battery packs with 28 series modules of 15 parallel cells each. In order to ensure safe operation, each battery cell must remain in its safe voltage operating range (2.5 - 4.2 V). Currently, all modules charge and discharge simultaneously. If any single module reaches 4.2V while charging, or 2.5V while discharging, the car must stop charging or discharging, respectively. During normal use, it is natural for the modules to become unbalanced. As the pack grows more unbalanced, the capacity of the entire battery pack decreases as it can only charge and discharge to the range of the lowest capacity module. An actively balanced battery box would ensure that we utilize all possible charge during the race, up to 5% more charge based on previous calculations.

# Solution Overview

We will implement active balancing which will redistribute charge in order to fully utilize the capacity of every module. This system will be verified within a test battery box so that it can be incorporated into future solar vehicles.

Solution Components:

- Test Battery Box (Hardware): The test battery box provides an interface to test new battery management circuitry and active balancing.

- Battery Sensors (Hardware): The current battery sensors for ISC do not include hardware necessary for active balancing. The revised PCB will include the active balancing components proposed below while also including voltage and temperature sensing for each cell.

- Active Balancing Circuit (Hardware): The active balancing circuit includes a switching regulator IC, transformers, and the cell voltage monitors.

- BMS Test firmware (Software): The Battery Management System requires new firmware to control and test active balancing.

# Criterion for Success

- Charge can be redistributed from one module to another during discharge and charge, to be demonstrated by collected data of cell voltages over time.

- BMS can control balancing.

- The battery pack should always be kept within safe operating conditions.