Electric vehicles - EV charging - Power electronics - Battery storage – Vehicle-to-grid – Grid integration

Dr.ir. Gautham Ram is an Assistant professor of electric mobility in the DC systems, Energy conversion and Storage group in the Department of Electrical Sustainable Energy at the Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. His current research focuses on electric vehicles, EV charging, batteries, power electronics and grid integration.

He received his bachelor’s and master’s in Electrical Engineering from the National Institute of Technology Trichy, India in 2011 and the Delft University of Technology in 2013, respectively. He received his PhD from Delft University in 2018 for the development of a solar-powered V2G electric vehicle charger with smart charging, compatible with CHAdeMO, CCS/COMBO (with PRE Power Developers, ABB and UT Austin). The project was awarded the ‘Most significant innovation in electric vehicles’ at the IDTechEx Show 2018 in Berlin and the ‘Best Tech idea of 2018’ by KIJK. From 2017 to 2019, he was a postdoctoral researcher at TU Delft working on research topics related to power converters for EV charging, batteries, smart charging of EVs, trolley busses.

He is involved in many projects at national and EU level concerning electric mobility such as TULIPS, Drive2X, FLOW, FlexEC, FLEXInet. He is the coordinator and a lecturer for Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Electric cars on edX.org with ~210,000 learners from 175 countries.

He is currently the Vice-chair of IEEE Industrial Electronic Society Benelux chapter and an Executive Committee member of the PowerWeb Institute, TU Delft. He is an Associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Transportation Electrification (2020-now), in the steering committee of the ESARS-ITEC conference 2023 and Technical Track chair for ITEC conference (2020-now), PEMC conference (2020-now).

Website: www.sites.google.com/view/gautham-ram/

Further information

• LinkedIn profile
• List of publications: Google Scholar , TU Delft PURE
• PhD thesis: Charging electric vehicles from solar energy - Power converter, charging algorithm and system design

Recognition:

Research:

• ‘Under 35 Innovator’ award from IEEE Industrial Electronic Society, 2019
• Winner ‘Most significant innovation in electric vehicles’ Award Presented at the IDTechEx Show Berlin, 2018
• The ‘Best Tech idea of 2018’ by science magazine KIJK
• ‘Apple Prize’ for outstanding research work in the Department of Electrical Sustainable Energy, TU Delft for the year 2016
• Featured on the Dutch national TV NPO1, in their prime time series ‘Breakthrough’ (Doorbraak) as part of the show Een Vandaag in July 2017
• Selected as one of three finalists for the ‘emove360° award for Energy storage’ in 2017
• National finalist of ClimateKIC Launchpad 2015, world’s largest cleantech business idea competition

Publications:

• Second prize in the Delft Energy Initiative ‘Best Energy Paper Award’, 2022 for W. Vermeer, G. R. C. Mouli and P. Bauer, "A Comprehensive Review on the Characteristics and Modelling of Lithium-ion Battery Ageing," in IEEE Transactions on Transportation Electrification, 2021, Early access
• Best Paper award in the IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics for 2018, “Energy management system with PV power forecast to optimally charge EVs at the workplace" by D.vd. Meer, G.R. Chandra Mouli, G. Morales-Espana, L.Elizondo, and P.Bauer
• Best poster award for G.R. Chandra Mouli, V. Prasanth, J.A. Ferreira, P. Bauer, M. Zeman, “Charging of EV from PV and Contactless Power”, Energy Informatics & Management (EIM) conference, 2016
• Best paper award (Poster category) for G.R. Chandra Mouli, A. Nithya, V. Jayashankar, & P.R. Goundan, “Fail Safe Operation of Audio Frequency Track Circuits for Railway Signalling”, Annual IEEE India Conference (INDICON), 2009 Annual (pp. 1-5)
• Web of science ‘highly cited paper’ placed in the top 1% of the academic field of Engineering for G. R. Chandra Mouli, P. Bauer, and M. Zeman, “System design for a solar powered electric vehicle charging station for workplaces,” Appl. Energy, vol. 168, pp. 434–443, 2016.

Research supervised:

• PhD thesis of Ibrahim Diab received the ‘Apple Prize’ for outstanding research work in the Department of Electrical Sustainable Energy, TU Delft for the year 2023
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• Bachelor project of C. Zevenbergen, J. Klip, J. van der Weerd, J. Holshuijsen, O. Twisk, P. Kalk, which was awarded the second prize in the AIAA/IEEE Electric Aircraft Technologies Symposium - Student Design Competition for eVOTL design, 2021
• MSc thesis of D.v.d Meer, which was awarded the second prize in Ward Vleugels Q-Park Thesis Award (Mobility & parking) in 2017
• MSc thesis of J. Sridhar, which was awarded the second prize for the UFD-Cofely Energy Efficiency Award in 2015

Education:

• Awarded the ‘Ambassador for Open and Online Education award’ by TU Delft, 2022

Gautham Ram is involved in the following research porjects at National and EU level.

Ongoing:

1. A bi-directional drive towards green electrification (Drive2x)
2. Flexible energy systems Leveraging the Optimal integration of EVs deployment Wave (FLOW)
3. Flexible energy communities using EV (FlexEC)
4. Energy hubs for charging of trucks (Plug-In)
5. Smart charging in mass deployment using machine learning
6. NEON: New (transport) Energy Outlook in the Netherlands
7. Flexinet - Intelligent flexibility through integrated energy storage (MOOI)
8. Demonstrating lower polluting solutions for sustainable airports across Europe (TULIPS)

Completed:  

1. Trolley 2.0(EME - Electric Mobility Europe) 
2. Orchestrating Smart Charging in mass Deployment (OSCD) project(EME - Electric Mobility Europe) 
3. Flexibility in distribution grids - Flexgrid  (TKI Urban energy) 
4. Electric Vehicle supported PV Smart grid(TKI Urban energy) 
5. Solar e-bike charging station