Development of a Rapid Recurrent Recharging Architecture for Battery Electric Heavy Duty Commercial Vehicle Applications
2022-01-0912
03/29/2022
- Event
- Content
- Battery electric vehicles (BEV) in heavy duty (HD) commercial freight transport face challenging technoeconomic barriers to adoption. Specifically, beyond safety and compliance, fleet and operational logistics require both high up-time and parity with diesel system productivity/Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) to enable strong adoption of electrified powertrains. At present, relatively high energy storage costs coupled with the increased weight of BEV powertrains limit their practicality in HD commercial freight transport to shorter range applications, where smaller batteries will suffice for mission (operational shift) energy requirements. This paper presents an alternative approach to the feasibility of BEV HD trucking in a broader range of applications. The concept is based on the leveraging rapid and recurrent recharging of a BEV HD truck that may either already make frequent stops due to shipment drop-offs/reloading or be required to make frequent stops along a longer mission only for recharging. While the challenges of the latter are well understood, this concept proposed explores making minimal impact to overall mission time by targeting high C-rate charging in 10-15 minutes while optimizing the frequency (miles) through which these events must occur. The concept optimizes battery size and chemistry, such that the expected life (years and total energy throughput) is balanced with the depth of discharge between recharging events, thus making complete use of the energy available through the life of the battery system. The solution is constrained to minimize the impact on payload capacity. Finally, the concept analyzes the critical levers in achieving diesel cost parity (based on a simplified vehicle TCO and required charging station costs), achieved through different purchase (including lease verse buy) and operational models. Thus, the concept identifies the application design domain where these solutions are viable with limited impact to fleet operations logistics.
- Citation
- Sujan, V., Xie, F., and Smith, D., "Development of a Rapid Recurrent Recharging Architecture for Battery Electric Heavy Duty Commercial Vehicle Applications," SAE Technical Paper 2022-01-0912, 2022, .