I’m an Irish citizen, currently based in London.
My application interests are cars, computing and batteries. I’m nostalgic about their past and energetically contributing to their future. I’m happiest when I’m engineering them. I loathe the all-too-lazy attitude that something can’t be done better or cheaper. I’m an optimist - sometimes wildly so - but that’s not often very problematic.
I’m passionate about mathematically modelling physical systems. I enjoy parameterisation, calibration and simulation. I get my energy from optimisation and from creating brilliant end-user experiences through these efforts. I believe differentiated outcomes are made possible by tightly vertically integrating across fields, and as such, I spend my time across many, including the development of sharp value propositions, engaging branding, cost structure innovation and coupled software & hardware development.
I welcome e-mail at ian@iancampbell.co. You can also find me on X and LinkedIn.
Nickel, fuzzy logic & batteries
I was exposed to batteries through radio control car racing. I competed up to European championship level, won two Irish national championships (2009 & 2010) and one junior British championship (2006). If you’re not familiar with the little monsters, you can see them in Lostallo, Switzerland, here, the year before I stopped. The noise is a single-cylinder, 3.5 cubic centimetre displacement two-stroke engine running to over 45k RPM on a methanol-nitromethane mixture, mated to a centrifugal clutch and two-speed gearbox.
The more I experienced the highs and lows of racing, which was at times influenced by battery failure, the more I fell in love with the engineering and origins of the sub-systems. The electronics package was one of those sub-systems, with servos, a receiver circuit and the battery pack; assembled in a 5S1P configuration from nickel-cadmium or nickel-metal hydride cells in Sub-C or AAA form factors. No balancing, simple but damaging constant current charging, and so few mAh available in 1P configuration that it was, in retrospect, no surprise that any amount of degradation led to the occasional catastrophic electronics shutdown during long races. The rich colours of the cell brands on cell shrink wrapping, the variety of shapes, the diversity of densities and the seemingly endless supply of bizarre behaviours (NiCd’s memory effect took the biscuit) were endearing.
When lithium-ion polymer packs appeared, they provided a step reduction in mass that was equal parts attractive and shocking to my young mind. Their oddity was requiring a voltage regulator to attenuate a 2S pack voltage down from 7.4 V to the 6.0 V of the NiMH packs they were replacing. In the early 2000s, I began using a TLP TL-15 charger. On the front of its attractively blue-anodized aluminium case were the words “FUZZY LOGIC COMPUTER CONTROL” in block capitals. I had no idea what it meant, but the oddities, features and mysteries together set in motion an engineering career and a love for batteries in a field that’s so expansive that I’m still enjoying developing solutions today.
Co-creator of adaptive charging
In 2019 I spun a technology company out of Imperial College London. The timing was good, with transport electrification just beginning to start in earnest. Through that spin-out I co-developed the algorithms and co-authored the patents of a new technology; a method of charging batteries based on real-time control of electrode potentials, which possesses some specific, valuable attributes.
It is sufficiently computationally lightweight as to be deployable on almost any microcontroller, which is new, and a departure from the legacy of academic work prior that produced equation systems requiring computation so heavy as to typically only be feasible offline, on non-embedded systems. It is robust, which is also new, with an equation system that is guaranteed to converge in all scenarios, thus enabling usage in uptime-critical and safety-critical applications. It is accurate and effective, and easy-to-evidence so with standard experimental data collection of a battery’s terminal voltage, capacity and temperature.
The technology is an enabler for extracting significantly more performance from batteries, while at the same time, empowering system developers with greater flexibility during their battery system development. Today, I continue to lead that spin-out; Breathe. I work together with a team of engineers and creatives to make batteries better. We have some wonderful customers, people and products.
Class-winning racing driver
I compete in motorsport in the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland. I prepare, run and drive my own Formula Ford together with my partner and father. I enjoy the three major facets of the sport equally; developing the car through the years, race engineering through weekends, and driving. Throughout my life these activities have provided a training ground for honing applied, multi-disciplinary engineering skills and for enhancing the grit and pain threshold that are necessary to succeed in sport.
I won my class in the Martin Donnelly Trophy event in Formula Ford in 2011. Since recommencing racing in 2019 I’ve competed in the Walter Hayes Trophy five times, placing as high as 11th overall from >100 entries. Prior to Formula Ford I competed in Formula Vee, where I won the Irish Formula Vee novice championship in 2011 and placed 3rd overall in the Irish Formula Vee championship in 2012.
I’ve had the privilege of taking a race car to its limits on some incredible circuits, including Donington Park, Silverstone, and Kirkistown on Ireland’s Ards Peninsula. I’ve experienced the expected - winning, losing, crashing and everything in-between - as well as the unexpected; the high-voltage output from the ignition coil (I challenge anyone to be expecting that), and an aeroplane landing alongside me during a test session.
To maintain fitness for motorsport, and because the triathlon community is wonderful, I started competing as a triathlon age-grouper. I mostly participate in Olympic or sprint distance events, and to date, have participated in various editions of the London, Hever Castle, Blenheim Palace and Reigate triathlons.
Writing & podcasts
Design optimisation and diagnostics for lithium-ion battery fast charging
Optimising lithium-ion cell design for plug-in hybrid and battery electric vehicles
EV Resource & Leaders In Cleantech
Open-source software
In 2017 I co-developed the open-source Battery Optimal Layer Design toolbox, BOLD released under the permissive MIT License. I co-developed an update package for the open-source Lithium-ION SIMulation BAttery toolbox, advancing the software from v1.024 to LIONSIMBA v2.0 in 2018. I co-developed the lithium-ion battery simulation software, LibattPy & provided the source to the Faraday Institution’s nascent Multi-Scale Modelling project in 2018. The source provided an example of a Python-based pseudo-two dimensional model implementation with automatic discretisation of partial differential equations, to support the project’s battery model development.
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