Chintan Pathak

Our lab – Sustainable Transportation Lab, works at the intersection of technology, policy, and human behavior. As part of CEI Grad fellowship, I plan to investigate the following subjects:

1. Finding the optimal locations of charging stations, for a city and state. Details: Electric vehicle drivers suffer from range anxiety, i.e. will they be stranded if the car is discharged. So a good network of charging stations is needed to alleviate range anxiety. Since, charging stations are costly investments, optimally locating them for maximum utilization is important.
2. Multi-scale optimization involving grid, vehicles, and battery. Details:  We plan to develop a control strategy for electric vehicles such that they can be relocated to facilitate balancing of load on the grid using the electric vehicle as a mobile distributed energy resource, allowing flow of power from and to the grid as needed, while making sure that the electric vehicle battery is operated to provide maximum life by use of physics-based model for battery control.

Advisor Don MacKenzie – Civil and Environmental Engineering