Inductive charging of electrical vehicles – Commercial vehicle applications

Background

Convenience and fast charging are requirements for enabling charging of electrified commercial vehicles in-use, e.g. at bus stops for city buses or at delivery/pick-up locations for city distribution vehicles. Automated contact-less charging through induction is an interesting alternative which is being investigated by several actors in the commercial vehicles arena.

Compared to solutions for electric cars, fast charging of commercial vehicles is done at significantly higher power levels. Another difference is that the charging locations are normally dedicated to the use of commercial vehicles and are not governed by the same requirements and service needs as public charge spots.

The proposed inductive charging of electrical commercial vehicles Master Thesis projects will be monitored by a reference group with members from the industry and Elforsk.

The task

This Master Thesis focuses the specific requirements on the vehicles as well as the charging equipment for electrified commercial vehicle applications. Aspects which are of interest are efficiency, operational features, vehicle integration health and environment. Other aspects that should be studied are the system’s endurance with respect to weather and wind, heavy vehicles etc. and system and control aspects. The business case for provision and operation of the dedicated charging infrastructure is also of interest.

The studies should also draw on the experiences of parallel experimental work being conducted on a 3 kW inductive charger for electric cars.

The proposed Master Thesis project comprises:

• A literature survey regarding ongoing standardization and application aspects of inductive charging of electrified commercial vehicles.
• An assessment of the scalability of the technology to meet commercial vehicles needs based on the experiments performed on the 3 kW demonstrator from a parallel project.
• An economical analysis of inductive charging for commercial based on the literature study, the experimental study and typical commercial vehicle use cases.