Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
45 RFID Anti-Theft Door Lock
Stanley Yang
Xinyi Zhang
Zhengchang Kou
Jacob Bryan design_document0.pdf
design_document0.pdf
design_document0.pdf
final_paper0.pdf
other0.pdf
presentation0.pdf
proposal0.pdf
Members:
-Zhengchang Kou
-Stanley Yang
-Xinyi Zhang

Description:
Our goal is to design an RFID anti-theft door lock. People can install this lock onto the front door of their house or some other places requiring high security. To open this door, people just need to touch the sensor area with a small RFID tag. It is much more convenient than the traditional approach that requires a key to open a door.

Moreover, this lock provides a reliable anti-theft function. You can connect this lock to your phone and check the status of your lock on your phone. This lock also contains an alarm that can make earsplitting noise. If someone without a proper tag spun the doorknob for five times, or even attempted to destroy the lock, your phone would ring to notice you, and the alarm would also ring to notice surrounding people. As a result, that person may forsake the attempt.

Traditional lock has an advantage: it does not require electricity power. If you tried to open your electrical lock, but the battery had just died, that would be quite annoying. However, we have considered this problem when we design this lock. Since this lock is not portable and stays on the door, it can be made a little big to hold a big battery. Our goal is to replace the battery once a year. Also, you can check the battery information on your phone, and you will be noticed if the battery is about to die. If your house has a wall outlet closed to your front door, you can simply plug the power into the outlet so as to obviate worry about the battery.

Active Cell Balancing for Solar Vehicle Battery Pack

Tara D'Souza, John Han, Rohan Kamatar

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.

- Test battery box provides a safe and usable platform for future tests.