Wayside Charging and Hydrogen Hybrid Bus: Extending the Range of Electric Shuttle Buses.

摘要

This report documents the results completed by the Center for Energy, Transportation and the Environment (CETE) at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC) under Federal Transit Administration Cooperative Agreement TN-26-7034. This research has addressed the limited range of electric shuttle buses by two different methods: first, by wayside charging using inductive power transfer, and second, by adding a small (10 kW) on-board generator set powered by an internal combustion engine (ICE) fueled by hydrogen. Wayside charging reduced fuel costs to less than $0.10 per mile while eliminating tailpipe emissions that would have been produced by a similar diesel bus. The hydrogen hybrid bus eliminated emission of CO2, but the cost was found to be prohibitive because of the relatively poor thermodynamic efficiency of the ICE and the high cost of hydrogen. Better results were obtained when the ICE was fueled with compressed natural gas (CNG), which resulted in a range in excess of 170 miles at a lower fuel cost per mile than a comparable diesel-fueled hybrid bus.