On September 12th, at 8 am US EDT, Prof. Pecht will be presenting a free webinar at Elsevier's e-Prime, titled "The Safety-related Challenges of Using Lithium-ion Batteries." This webinar discusses how to mitigate safety hazards before the occurrence of thermal runaway, various mitigation strategies applied for battery cells and packages, and reviews other safety issues for Li-ion batteries.

Namkyoung Lee, who earned a Ph.D. in Reliability Engineering from the University of Maryland in 2023, currently holds the position of Research Associate in the CALCE, and his key research is "Prognostics and Health Management." In July 2023, Namkyoung Lee successfully completed his Ph.D. with a dissertation titled "Interpretable and Speed Adaptive Convolutional Neural Network for Prognostics."

On 10th August 2023, CAiRS (Center for Advanced in Reliability Systems) organized an informative Public Seminar on "Strategies for Sustaining Systems Reliability." The event offered valuable insights into sustaining systems reliability and attracted participants from various backgrounds. 

On August 10, 2023, the ASQ Reliability and Risk Division (ASQ RRD) hosted a webinar titled "Reliability Risks in a Supply Chain in Turmoil" by Dr. Diganta Das. The webinar addressed supply chains' challenges during unprecedented turmoil caused by events like the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Dr. Das highlighted the strategies to manage and mitigate reliability risks in such times through supply chain management.

In recent years, electric vehicle safety incidents related to batteries have occurred frequently enough to question the adequacy of the current international safety standards. As the world's leading producer of batteries for electric vehicles, China has thus formulated its own national standards, but there are questions as to the unique value of these standards. ...

This article is available for free until Sep 26, 2023.

Accurate state of charge (SOC) estimation is helpful for battery management systems to extend batteries’ lifespan and ensure the safety of batteries. However, due to the pseudo-positive definiteness of the covariance matrix and noise statistics error accumulation, the SOC estimation of lithium-ion batteries is usually inaccurate or even divergent using Kalman filters, such as the unscented Kalman filter (UKF) and the square-root unscented Kalman filter (SRUKF). ...

Video calling is one of the most energy-intensive features in apps requiring the simultaneous operation of the mobile camera, display screen, audio speaker, and internet services. This feature impacts a smartphone battery's runtime and lifetime. This paper is the first of its kind experimental study, which quantifies the operating profile (discharge current, temperature, and terminal voltage) of video call feature in multiple widely used social media apps, which include WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Zoom, Skype, WeChat, Google Hangouts, Imo and Viber. ...

Wearable medical devices are widely used for monitoring and treatment of patients. Electrostatic discharge can render these devices unreliable and cause a temporary or permanent disturbance in their operation. ...

Switch mode power supplies present light weight power conversion solutions, but degradation affecting sub-components have been known to transition the converter to move to unstable dynamic operations. This paper presents a method to build interpretive prognostics for switch mode power supplies with electromagnetic input filters by modeling sub-component degradation trajectories and using discrete event simulation to generate lifecycle data associated with the system impedances to use as inputs into machine learning based prognostics to make interpretable remaining useful life predictions. ...