First-Principles Problem Solving
Evidence · 7 projects
Investigated cost and performance improvements on battery pack internals by sourcing, testing, and iterating on alternate materials, geometries, and architectures.
Covered under NDA. Scope and skills listed reflect what I've been cleared to share.
Discharged cells, built a test rig, collected thermocouple data, and derived an h-correlation from it.
Quick project so the team could understand busbar thermal behavior and write better specs. I²R + convection ODE with temperature-dependent resistivity, analytical steady state, numerical transient.
First-principles derivation of $Nu = C \cdot Re^m \cdot Pr^n$ rearranged to isolate $h$. Shows the velocity exponent $m$ dominates the scaling, so doubling cooling capacity roughly needs 16× fan power (fan affinity laws, $m \approx 0.7$). Grounds the empirical h-correlation I derived on the FSAE accumulator.
2024 MATLAB-era structural hand calcs for the UV26 accumulator segment pre-design, now ported to Python. Covers polycarbonate lid bending, fastener tension / shear / bearing, Euler-Johnson buckling, G10 bond strength, and passive thermal, all under SES 20g vertical / 40g lateral crash loads. Every safety factor above 1.0.
Won the UVic/BCSEA hackathon (1st place). Designed an off-grid solar + wind + battery e-bike charging station. Sized every subsystem from provided weather data: demand, solar PV, VAWT, battery storage. Did V-model systems engineering with ConOps, FMEA risk register, and a BOM with real off-the-shelf components.
Had to pick a gear ratio with acceleration, motor efficiency, top speed, and packaging all pulling in different directions. Built an iterative traction model that couples weight transfer with acceleration to find worst-case diff torque. Landed on 4.2, which sits on the right edge of the motor efficiency plateau while guaranteeing traction-limited accel and keeping diff loads within spec.