My rise as an engineer is marked by a history of consistently high performance in my career building endeavors. I have always been highly enthusiastic about the creative and analytical nature of engineering, and that passion has lead me to pursue excellence wherever possible in engineering related activities and employment. These experiences are what brought me to my current and foremost position as a Formula SAE Electric team lead and graduating senior engineering student.
I joined the Texas A&M Formula SAE Electric Racing team in the fall of 2021 when the organization was in its infancy. I was onboarded and immediately dove into solo design on powertrain cooling, a subsystem which required me to reach beyond my electrical background into the fields of fluids and heat transfer. My performance and dedication to the team was noticed and resulted in my promotion to full team member within two months of joining. In the subsequent period of time I developed new design skills at an extremely rapid pace, and which eventually led to my promotion to Powertrain Lead.
I took upon myself the challenge of designing the FSAE car’s complete routing system architecture. I created and iterated a comprehensive set of detail wiring diagrams with an accompanying cable schedule which integrated all electrical systems together and allowed for pre-fabrication of harnesses and made troubleshooting considerably easier. This process required intimate understanding of all electrical components of the car, and was a great demonstration of my intuition for high level design tasks.
I found myself able to develop and iterate documents at a rapid pace in due to my prior mastery of AutoCAD, which largely occurred during my summer as a an electrical engineering intern at Powell Industries in Houston. Powell was a valuable and immersive experience into the industrial power sector, wherein I learned to navigate the many hurdles posed by regulation. My work had to do predominantly with the interconnect and fault management of large networks of high voltage and high current switchgear and control systems, while certifying compliance within stringent IEC, NEC, and NEMA standards.
My experience with regulation was also valuable in Formula, where rules compliance is exceedingly difficult and the determining factor in whether a team makes it onto the track at competition. My design of the car’s mixed-voltage PCB was an exercise in rules compliance as the board incorporated the main DC buck converter as well as the motor controller discharge and other circuits together. This was a particularly challenging first PCB design, with requirements for high current, voltage isolation and spacing, as well as thermal management.
I also put my PCB design skills to use on a creative solution to a rules roadblock which I facetiously named the Fused Isolation Boards or FIBs. These were boards which incorporated overcurrent protection and voltage isolating switching into each of the 85 BMS taps of the car’s battery pack, and were a necessary response to a rule prohibiting unprotected high voltage from leaving the battery pack.
It was in the later months of the 2022 season that I discovered my interest in EV battery systems. When the team found itself behind schedule at the end of the semester and all but four of us had left for internships I took over the manufacturing of the vehicle battery system. During the month of May I spent nearly every waking minute in the shop to bring the battery from a state of non-existence to fully functional in time for competition.
Following the 2022 FSAE competition I interned at Volcon ePowersports, a young EV startup creating electric off road vehicles on an accelerated timeline. My interest in battery technology led me to create an automated system for realistic battery lifecycle testing. This system allowed for multiple batteries to be cycled through charging and discharging which used real ride data to mimic actual load cases, all while collecting BMS data and requiring zero human involvement. For the control of the system I used a network of embedded microcontrollers and switchgear for which I wrote a 3000+ line Python/C software suite. It continues to save Volcon hundreds of man hours per month on testing.
I returned to Texas A&M and to the FSAE Electric team in the fall and was unanimously elected Battery Lead for the 2023 season which I am finding to be a wonderfully multidisciplinary design challenge. The pack design this year is on track to surpass all expectations for volumetric and gravimetric energy and power density while keeping car CG low and central and without compromising on adaptability. I devised a passively air cooled cylindrical cell architecture with easily swappable segments which puts an emphasis on reliability through simplicity as well as manufacturability. At the present I am working to design custom fusible links which are integrated with the parallel busbars and optimized for minimal voltage drop.
