Electrification of public transportation: Battery swappable smart electric bus with battery swapping station

Abstract

As an effort to reduce greenhouse gas and save fossil fuels, electrification of public transportation system, namely a battery swappable smart electric bus system has been developed and is currently in pilot operation. The system consists of a battery swappable smart electrified bus, a battery swapping station and a smart bus information service. With this battery swapping strategy and solution approach, efficient and economical operation of the public transportation system can be tried out and evaluated for its usefulness. Furthermore, as the independent ownership of the battery can be readily exercised, a new business model for the battery swapping and charging station can be developed independently from the ownership of the bus. Detailed description of the overall architecture of the system is provided in the current paper. I. INTRODUCTION Increasing concerns about whether pattern changes due to global warming issues force many legislatives to establish some sort of rules and regulations as an effort to limit the production of greenhouse gases such as CO2 (1)(2)(3). However, as we all realize, CO2 is a fair product of nice and clean burn from a combustion engine as long as the engine uses hydro-carbon based fuels. As a result, the only way to control the excessive production of CO2 is to alleviate or avoid the use of the hydro-carbon based fuels. Luckily enough, reduced or limited use of hydro-carbon based fuels can also mean the savings of the crude oil resources for our descendants. Furthermore, for many countries, reduced dependency on the crude oil may mean the strengthened energy independency and the enhanced national security matters. Based on the recent studies, it is well known that about 28% of the overall CO2 production in the U.S. (4) and about 20% of the overall CO2 production in Korea (5) are from the transportation sector. Among many efforts to reduce the CO2 production from the ground transportation system, fuel cell vehicles and electric vehicles have been at the center of R&D and over last few years, many different vehicles have been introduced in the market worldwide. In this paper, a special type of public transportation system, a battery swappable smart electric bus, is introduced. The importance of the public transportation system increases since one of the megatrend in the future is the growth of cities which will result in massive traffic congestion in the city areas. In order to address the needs for the reduction of the CO2 and the alleviation of the traffic congestion in the cities, this newly introduced battery swappable smart electric bus is fully expected to play an important role.