Abstract
Electrified vehicles have undergone great evolution during the last decade because of the increasing attention paid on environmental sustainability, greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution. Emission regulations are becoming increasingly tight, and governments have been allocating multiple funds to facilitate the spreading of the so-called green mobility. In this context, steering towards electrified solutions not only for passenger vehicles, but also for compact off-highway vehicles extensively employed, for instance, on construction sites located in urban areas, warehouses, and greenhouses, is essential even if seldom considered. Moreover, the electrification of compact off-highway machinery may allow manufacturers to increase their expertise in and lower the costs of these alternative solutions, while gathering useful data to be applied in bigger and more remunerative off-highway vehicles. In fact, while electric automobiles are as of now real alternatives for buyers, off-highway vehicles, regardless of the application, are mostly in the research and experimental phase, with few of them already on the market. This delay, in comparison with the passenger automotive industry, is caused by different factors, mostly related to the different tasks of off-highway vehicles in terms of duty cycles, productivity performance parameters and user acceptability. The aim of this paper is to give an overview of the many aspects of the electrification of compact off-highway vehicles, to highlight the key differences between on-highway and off-highway vehicles and to summarize in a single source of information the multiple solutions investigated by researchers and manufacturers.
Highlights
The attention directed toward environmental sustainability has undergone a great increase in recent years, with the authorities pushing more and more towards a cleaner and more efficient usage of energy
The automotive supply chain has been addressing the process of electrification for more than a decade, and there are many feasible alternatives to the internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles; at the same time, this growth is pushing the off-highway vehicle industry to accelerate its progress in the same process
This review aims to summarize the main topics surrounding the electrification of compact off-highway vehicles and machinery, highlighting which components or technologies are more suited for the compact segment of the industry, while aiming to show how important compact machinery are and can be for the electrification of the whole industry; the authors believe that the compact segment is sometimes underestimated and, as far as the authors know, this is the first comprehensive review with a specific focus on the components that best suit these types of machinery
Summary
The attention directed toward environmental sustainability has undergone a great increase in recent years, with the authorities pushing more and more towards a cleaner and more efficient usage of energy. The automotive supply chain has been addressing the process of electrification for more than a decade, and there are many feasible alternatives to the internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles; at the same time, this growth is pushing the off-highway vehicle industry to accelerate its progress in the same process In this regard, off-highway vehicles are an important source of emissions and fuel consumption [6], and, both in Europe and in the United States, authorities have been tightening the emission standards for non-road vehicles and machinery with the “TIER 1 . This implies important differences between automotive drive cycles and off-highway duty cycles, where the power requirements of hydraulic systems, ancillaries, implements and so on are major variables, highly fluctuating over a mission profile [13] For this reason, the off-highway industry is investigating electrification to improve ancillaries and implements, too, in order to achieve lower operating costs, better control systems and new design possibilities [14]. On the basis of a market analysis, we aim to show the actual trends in both the research and the industrial fields, providing the reader with a forecast about what to expect in the few years
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