A team of five mechanical engineering students from The University of Tulsa achieved a remarkable victory in the prestigious Consortium for the Advancement of Shape Memory Alloy Research and Technology (CASMART) student design competition in Portugal. The UTulsa team beat such top universities as the University of North Texas, Iowa State University, Northwestern University, The University of Toledo, and Georgia Institute of Technology at the May event.
The 2024 CASMART competition, now in its sixth iteration, is an international event that challenges teams of university students to develop innovations in shape memory alloys (SMAs) and explore innovative applications of SMAs. Held in conjunction with the Shape Memory and Superelastic Technologies (SMST) conference, this competition attracts participants from around the globe every two years.
UTulsa’s team members are Teresa Valenzuela (program manager), Malia Aurigemma, Bryce Charles, Sean Free, and Kai Crouch. Their journey began as part of their mechanical engineering capstone program.
Pioneering battery safety
The team presented groundbreaking work on a Nitinol-based safety device to prevent fires in lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries. This device preemptively stops fires without the need for any software or external controls. If it overheats, the device automatically cuts the circuit to a defective battery cell, preventing a cascading “thermal runaway” event that could ignite surrounding cells and potentially an entire battery pack. Valenzuela emphasized their approach: “Don’t fix a hardware problem with software.”
With trillions of Li-ion cells produced globally each year and demand rising exponentially, a fail-safe fire-prevention mechanism is critical. Defective cells are inevitable, and ensuring safety is paramount, especially when considering the potential hazards in everyday scenarios, such as charging an electric vehicle at home.
The team is working with Bill Lawson, UTulsa’s director of technology commercialization, to file intellectual property protection for their invention. They have submitted an invention disclosure to the university, with the five students as the co-inventors. While none of the team members plan to start a business from the idea immediately, they hope to license the technology.
The team’s success was made possible through support from various organizations, including Fort Wayne Metals, the National Science Foundation, The University of Tulsa, ASM International, the International Organization on Shape Memory and Superelastic Technologies (SMST), and CASMART.