Driving Range Extension

The EVERLASTING technology allows improving the energy-efficient operation of an electric city-bus (D7.6 Demonstrator) by influencing the driving behavior, leading to an extension of the driving range for a given route and trip time. To define this improvement, a regular bus driver generates the baseline, with no support of the developed technology, while a trained bus diver receives (energy-efficient) visual feedback to correct the current to the optimal velocity, when needed.

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VALIDATION AND RESULTS

To show the driving range improvement, two testing scenarios are summarized in Table 1. The Reference scenario provides the baseline, without the EVERLASTING technology activated, while the EVERLASTING scenario includes the developed controllers, algorithms and strategies.

Table 1: Activities and resources for the testing scenarios Table 1: Activities and resources for the testing scenarios

The driving range is a function of the battery capacity, the vehicle velocity and the energy consumed during the trip. These signals, among many others, are logged for the two test scenarios (Table 1) and the driving range extension is expressed as a percentage ratio of the difference.

To resemble a city-bus application, a test route of 8.64 [km] is selected. This route is divided into 3 sections and covered in 753 [s]. In Figure 4, the Reference and EVERLASTING scenarios are shown with dashed and solid lines, respectively; making a distinction between route sections. Note that the top plot shows the total power consumption, and the bottom plot depicts the velocity profile. The experiments generated 5 valid tests with an average driving range extension of 5.6%.

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Figure 4: Total power consumption and Velocity profile for the Reference and EVERLASTING (Trip 2) scenarios, for a given route of 8.64km divided into three sections

Figure 4: Total power consumption and Velocity profile for the Reference and EVERLASTING (Trip 2) scenarios, for a given route of 8.64km divided into three sections.