Michael Fowler
About
Michael Fowler is a Professor and is cross-appointed to the Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering at the University of Waterloo.
Professor Fowler’s research focuses on electrochemical power sources in vehicles, specifically degradation analysis and control of batteries in hybrid and plug-in hybrid power trains. His interest takes him into the modelling of fuel cells and requires simulating the performance and reliability of fuel cells and batteries. Professor Fowler’s research group is interested in performance evaluation, diagnostics, and forensics associated with fuel cell stacks, single cells and batteries. His study of fuel cell failure mode and reliability also encompasses the extensive development of polymers due to their function as the fuel cells’ electrolyte, gas diffusion layer and blending of polymers for conductive bipolar plates.
One of the key questions to be addressed in the 'hydrogen economy' is the clean production and distribution of hydrogen. Through a series of publications and presentations, his work has furthered the concept of 'clean energy hubs' as distributed energy generation systems including wind and solar, and large scale systems with CO2 free nuclear energy as a key components of the hubs. Unique to this work is the consideration the integration of natural gas and electrical distribution systems through the ‘Power to Gas’ concept of energy storage and distribution. This work has principally included hydrogen as an energy vector, but also considered the impact of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles within such clean energy hubs.
His expertise in fuel cell technology has landed him the position of co-faculty supervisor of competitive vehicle team design projects; ChallengeX and EcoCar where he has supervised the development of two fuel cell vehicles, and two plug-in hybrid vehicle. Professor Fowler assists these teams with their design, construction, implementation and testing of hybrid vehicles. He also supervises other award winning student teams in the design of Green Energy Systems.