Rose-Hulman team places among North America’s top battery challengers

By AI, Created 5:01 PM UTC, June 04, 2026, /AGP/ – Rose-Hulman students, working with Ivy Tech Community College, tied for third place in the Battery Workforce Challenge, a three-year electric vehicle battery competition backed by Stellantis and the U.S. Department of Energy. The finish capped a run that also produced a software award and a pipeline to internships and jobs in EV and battery technology.

Why it matters: - The finish puts Rose-Hulman and Ivy Tech among the top battery engineering programs in North America. - The competition gave undergraduate students hands-on experience in electric vehicle battery design, testing, and integration. - The project also connected students to employers in the fast-growing EV and battery sectors.

What happened: - A Rose-Hulman team paired with Ivy Tech Community College students tied for third place in the final year of the Battery Workforce Challenge. - The University of Alabama and Shelton State Community College team also tied for third place. - The Ohio State University and Columbus State Community College team took first place. - The competition was a three-year advanced electric vehicle battery design challenge sponsored by Stellantis and the U.S. Department of Energy. - Argonne National Laboratory managed the competition in collaboration with the Department of Energy. - Eleven university and vocational school partnerships from across North America participated. - Teams designed, built, tested, and integrated an advanced battery pack for a Ram ProMaster EV commercial van platform.

The details: - Rose-Hulman and Ivy Tech were one of 11 North American partnerships selected for the challenge. - The Rose-Hulman effort was led primarily by undergraduate students from multiple STEM fields. - Many competing programs were staffed largely by graduate and doctoral students. - In the final year, teams finalized battery pack designs, studied packaging trade-offs, and developed manufacturing supply strategies. - Teams also had to meet engineering and safety standards set by industry professionals. - The Rose-Hulman/Ivy Tech team won the competition’s “Over the HIL” software award. - The award recognized a bench-test platform that verified communications within the battery pack system through Hardware-in-the-Loop testing. - Students designed and executed the battery pack control system. - The control system passed all required final evaluations on the first attempt. - In year one, the team finished fifth overall and won awards for project initiation planning and technical design presentations. - In year two, the team moved up to third overall and earned honors for module integrity, geometric dimensioning and tolerancing, and technical communications. - Students designed, assembled, integrated, and tested nearly every component of the battery system. - The team included students from mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer engineering, computer science, chemistry, chemical engineering, engineering design, physics, and software engineering.

Between the lines: - The result signals that undergraduate teams can compete with heavily graduate-staffed programs in complex EV engineering work. - The challenge appears to have functioned as both a competition and a talent pipeline for the auto and battery industries. - Participating students have already landed internships and full-time roles at Stellantis, Samsung, and Texas Instruments. - Rose-Hulman’s performance fits a broader institutional pattern in advanced vehicle and energy competitions such as ChallengeX, EcoCAR, and EcoCAR2.

What’s next: - Rose-Hulman students who took part in the challenge are positioned for more internships and early-career roles in EV and battery technology. - The school is likely to keep using competition-based projects as a training ground for applied engineering work. - The Battery Workforce Challenge has set a model for future university-industry partnerships in battery workforce development.

The bottom line: - Rose-Hulman and Ivy Tech turned a three-year student competition into a top-three North American finish, a software award, and real career pathways in electric vehicle engineering.