I started investigating strain monitoring as a useful tool for monitoring battery cycling and aging when I joined the lab of Dr. Tanya Hutter, whose work is centered on sensing – primarily optical.
As part of an initiative to expand the lab’s work into the booming field of batteries, I joined and started with simple sensors – strain gauges.
I started by prototyping strain sensing circuits using cheap off the shelf components. An arduino, a simple quarter wheatstone bridge and an HX711 load cell amplifier board.
I created a poster summarizing the purpose of strain monitoring in batteries along with my progress and presented it at an undergraduate research forum.
