Undergraduate Research at BMSLab Advances Rapid Battery Health Assessment
Assessing battery health typically requires lengthy charge–discharge testing, creating a major barrier to the
rapid screening of batteries for second-life applications. BMSLab researchers are investigating faster
approaches that can extract useful indicators of battery aging from short electrical tests.
As a second-year electrical engineering student and University of Windsor Outstanding Scholar, Masa Damdoum
worked on this problem under the mentorship of BMSLab PhD researcher Prarthana Pillai. Masa investigated a new
resistance-ratio metric derived from a short two-tier battery pulse test. The method was evaluated using data
from 96 repurposed lithium iron phosphate cells and showed promising relationships with conventional
battery-aging indicators, including capacity fade and voltage retention.
The research resulted in the IEEE conference paper, “A Pulse-Derived Resistance Ratio Metric for Rapid
Battery State-of-Health Assessment”, with Masa as the first author—a remarkable research achievement for
a second-year undergraduate student. The work was conducted with Prarthana Pillai and BMSLab director Balakumar
Balasingam.
“Masa undertook this research while only in her second year of undergraduate studies. Her work demonstrates what talented undergraduate students can achieve when they are given the opportunity to engage in meaningful research and receive strong mentorship from senior students”
— BMSLab director Balakumar Balasingam