David Howey MA MEng PhD SMIEEE

Professor David Howey received his MEng degree from Cambridge University (2002) and PhD degree from Imperial College London (2010) on the topic of heat transfer in electrical machines. He also worked as an engineering consultant between 2002 and 2005.

In 2011, David moved to Oxford where he is now Professor of Engineering Science and Tutorial Fellow at St Hilda’s College. His current research interests are focused on modelling and managing energy storage systems, for electric vehicles as well as grid and off-grid power systems.

Professor David Howey's research expertise is in modelling, diagnostics and control of electrochemical energy devices and systems. Lithium-ion batteries are his current main focus, and he also has interests in sodium-ion batteries, lead-acid batteries, flow batteries, and supercapacitors.

His group’s aim is to improve performance and cost by predicting dynamics and lifetime, estimating temperatures and faults, and measuring how and why devices perform in the real world. This requires them to address fundamental issues in modelling, instrumentation and data processing.

David works extensively with industry in the UK, Germany and Korea, on topics including accelerated ageing, remaining lifetime estimation and optimal control of grid storage, with Continental Automotive GmbH, Jaguar Land Rover, Siemens UK, and others. In 2012 he won a Samsung GRO Award on lithium-ion battery modelling, which was renewed, and also led to a separate R&D contract directly with Samsung Applied Institute of Technology in South Korea. He was also UK PI on a 3-year, $1.2m project funded directly by the Korean Government on microgrids and storage, and has been involved in many large collaborative UK projects, funded by EPSRC, the Faraday Institution and InnovateUK. In 2017 his group spun-out a battery management systems company called Brill Power which won the Shell New Energy Challenge in 2017 and the Japan New Energy Challenge in 2018.

David is a Senior Member of the IEEE, an editorial board member for the IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, and an editorial board member for Oxford Open Energy.

• Principal Investigator, Faraday Institution project on UK EV and Battery Scale-up, aiming to understand the uptake for electric vehicles and battery production in the UK out to 2040.
• Principal Investigator, InnovateUK project 'Catalysing energy access in Africa through smarter energy storage management' (EP/R035822/1), developing novel machine learning approaches for managing decentralised off-grid power systems.
• Principal Investigator, InnovateUK project 'Portable solar powered electricity supplies using recovered batteries', (EP/P510737/1), developing novel techniques for reusing batteries at the end of their first life.
• Co-Investigator, EPSRC MANIFEST project (EP/N032888/1), understanding multi scale analysis facilities for energy storage.
• Co-Investigator, EPSRC TRENDS project (EP/R020973/1), investigating novel diagnostics techniques for energy storage.
• Co-Investigator, EPSRC RHYTHM project (EP/N034570/1), modelling energy storage within microgrids.
• Principal Investigator (UK), IMBEDS project on battery energy management funded by KETEP (Republic of Korea), developing machine learning driven forecasting and control techniques for grid energy storage systems.
• Co-Investigator, EU MARIE CURIE ITN (607361) ‘ADEPT’, on thermal management of electrical motors.
• Co-Investigator, EPSRC project ‘STABLE-NET’ (EP/L014343/1), understanding the role of energy storage in power grid stability.
• Principal Investigator, Samsung Global Outreach Award, developing novel electrochemical model based battery management systems.
• Lead academic/PI on industry-led InnovateUK project ‘Energy Superhub Oxford’ (ref. 104779), focused on large grid energy storage systems

I am interested in supervising DPhil students with an interest in Electrochemical Engineering, Batteries, Energy Storage, Condition Monitoring, Diagnostics, and Thermal Management.