Operator Challenge Response

The goal of this project will be a coordinated team effort to develop a case study on alternative battery technology. Over the course of the past two decades, significant progress has been made in the way of developing renewable and sustainable energy to supply the world’s ever-growing needs. However, finding an affordable and sustainable solution to store this power has become a major challenge. Using our team’s various backgrounds in engineering, our team’s case study will ultimately provide an analysis on several emerging battery technologies and the potentials and drawbacks of each.

The main problem our team looks to address is discerning which nascent  battery technologies seem to hold the optimal balance of cost, cleanliness, power, and scalability.

Our team will tackle this problem by breaking into teams to focus on various types of alternative battery chemistry, and be tasked with addressing different components of their assigned type of technology in order to submit a formalized conglomerate case study of all researched solutions.

While we have a talented team, there are some significant challenges we face as a group conducting research on alternative batteries. For one, all of our members are underclassmen and possess limited lab experience or a background in batteries. This will likely need to be addressed by myself and the other sophomores who do have a general understanding of battery chemistry in order to bring our freshmen up to speed. Another challenge that faces us is the lack of hands-on access to these technologies to test our proposals. We will thus be limited to our background knowledge on the subject, and will not be able to conduct in-depth research on the recorded success of this technology.