The PyBaMM Community
We care about the community that we’re building around open-source battery modelling. Come and be a part of it.
PyBaMM is an open-source battery modelling framework which started in academia but has grown to be so much more. The founding team embraced the open-source philosophy of collaboration and worked hard in the early days to foster a strong community. As a result, newcomers to the battery modelling field have a great resource to get started with and build upon, plenty of enthusiastic people to ask questions, and the opportunity to contribute to a sustainable long-lasting project with real-world impact.
A great boost to this community and a cornerstone in the success of the PyBaMM project has been the funding and development opportunities provided by the UK’s Faraday Institution which recognised the PyBaMM teams’ efforts with their Community Award in 2021 (watch our video here). PyBaMM forms a key part of the common modeling framework being developed by battery researchers in the UK spearheaded by Professor Greg Offer of Imperial College London (check out this great article by Greg on why understanding battery degradation is important and how modelling can help). Greg and the other researchers in the Multi-Scale Modelling project embrace open source wholeheartedly and share their cutting-edge battery research with the hope that together the community can build solutions faster, more efficiently and more sustainably than they otherwise would.
The PyBaMM project now has over 50 contributors from around the world and has become a NumFOCUS sponsored project with the aim of ensuring that its governance and resources directed towards the project can be independent of any single commercial entity or research group. At Ionworks, we form a core part of the PyBaMM development team and we value the community that we helped to build and want to see it continue to grow.
We have appointed open source legend Travis Oliphant as an advisor via OpenTeams primarily to help with forming our business strategy, of which community engagement is a fundamental part. Travis is CEO at OpenTeams and Quansight, Founder of Anaconda, NumFOCUS and PyData and the creator of NumPy, SciPy, and Numba.
Let’s get hacking: our research friends at the University of Oxford also recently hosted a PyBaMM hackathon which ran very successfully with 5 teams solving 5 different problems led by a mentor from the core development team. We will be sure to repeat this and will also be reaching out for corporate sponsors so get in touch if this is something your company might be interested in.
With PyBMM we aim to provide a battery modelling toolkit for both academia and industry that helps engineers and students to solve important real-world battery problems. A great aspect of working on the PyBaMM project for us has been to observe the impact that our research has had directly on the people that use it. We’d love to here more of this and we’re excited to keep up the momentum and drive innovation in the battery modelling field even further together. Ionworks has several products that we’ll be launching this year with the aim of increasing the reach of PyBaMM and lowering the barrier to entry for non-coders to use the tool and we can’t wait to share them with you all.
For PyBaMM support and community news and the occasional battery-related meme join the PyBaMM slack channel here.
For technical help on the open source post a discussion on Github here.
If you have a particular enterprise problem that you need help with or would like bespoke training or development then please email info@ion-works.com or hit the button below.
Finally… if you are using PyBaMM in industry then you may also wish to consider sponsoring the open source project here.
