A team consisting of Rose-Hulman and Ivy Tech Community College-Terre Haute students earned third place overall honors and several leading technical awards in the second year of the three-year Battery Workforce Challenge, the nation’s premiere collegiate competition in battery manufacturing and workforce development.

At the year-end competition May 4-9 in Indianapolis the 12 competing teams were evaluated on their ability to build and test a team-designed module for an electric vehicle battery pack to be integrated into a competition vehicle, a 2024 Ram ProMaster commercial electric van donated from Stellantis.

The Battery Workforce Challenge is a public-private partnership and North American collegiate engineering competition, managed by Argonne National Laboratory in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and sponsored by Stellantis.

During the competition’s second year, students were challenged to fully design and develop battery architecture, including a battery module, battery disconnect unit (BDU), and software architecture. Teams received industry expert support in the form of design reviews to help elevate students' understanding of the battery design process.

In Indianapolis, teams presented their module, BDU, and Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) to a panel of industry subject matter experts in each field. Teams made up of a North American university and a vocational school partner were each judged on module design progress, project management, and market development and communications.

The Rose-Hulman/Ivy Tech team received $12,500 in awards from placing in the following categories:

• Third Place Overall: $8,000 for total points received throughout the year, out of 1,000 total points available. The team came into the competition in Indianapolis ranked fourth from earlier reports and moved up one spot in the standings, based on consistency and robustness across all realms of the challenge.
• $2,000 for demonstrating the best battery module design. The team’s module testing inspection received flawless scores from industry judges.
• $1,000 for demonstrating the best use of Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing in the team’s BDU design and fabrication.
• $1,000 Best Green Garage Blog-Sponsor Showcase for best blog crafted for the Advanced Vehicle Technology Competition website that highlighted the team’s lithium-ion cell sponsor, Samsung SDI America. 
• $500 for the best team utilizing the RASIC Project Management tool to provide a clear outline of roles and responsibilities of the team members throughout the year.

Rose-Hulman/Ivy Tech Team Project Manager Jack Martin, a mechanical engineering senior, noted that “our team is the only all undergraduate in the competition, with most other teams being led by PhD and full-time master's-level students.”

Team Engineering Manager Jasper Halford, an electrical engineering senior, added, “The Battery Workforce Challenge has provided our team with countless career and learning opportunities, and given undergraduate students at Rose-Hulman the chance to be competitive with teams of graduate students at top universities. This is quite the testament to the quality of our students.”

Learn more about Rose-Hulman’s Battery Workforce Challenge team at https://www.rose-hulman.edu/academics/degrees-and-programs/battery-workforce-challenge.html

McMaster University and Mohawk College team (Canada) was named the first place Year 2 champion while second place was awarded to The Ohio State University and Columbus State Community College team. Other challenge participants are California State University-Los Angeles, Clemson University, Colorado School of Mines, Jackson State University, University of Alabama, University of California-Merced, University of Michigan-Dearborn, University of Nevada-Las Vegas, and University of Waterloo (Canada).

"From the fall 2024 workshop at the Stellantis headquarters in Auburn Hills, Michigan, to the winter workshop in Greenville, South Carolina, in February and now on the final leg of our North American educational road trip in Indianapolis, this year's students have shown the determination and potential to be among the top engineers and technicians in the automotive space," stated Micky Bly, senior vice president and head of Global Propulsion Systems at Stellantis, in a Battery Workforce Challenge news release.