EQUIPMENT
/ NEW
"THREE-KILM" VAN FROM LUCERNE
STOCK OF THE “MULTI RIDER” TOTAL … THREE KILOMETERS
MATERIALS RUBRIC PREPARED / ALEXEI SPARROW-SHOES
Who needs it, this electro-Ducato, you say, and … make a mistake. Logistics specialists from Swiss Lucerne are looking for him at least a separate niche in the market.
Imagine this picture: a certain company has to constantly carry goods from a warehouse to a retail outlet (or factory) over a distance of several city blocks. The van, without poisoning the air, without rumbling the engine, drives up to the unloading ramp and freezes just above the rectangle drawn on the asphalt. As workers roll out the load, the supercapacitor batteries charge for the next trip. It takes only three minutes, and thanks to the devices of the German company Vampfler, you don’t even need to connect anything anywhere. It is only important to stop with an accuracy of 10 cm - and an electromagnetic coupling will be established between the inductor and the receiver. In fact, this is a transformer, only due to the increased operating frequency (15-30 kHz instead of the usual 50 Hz) is it not afraid of the air gap between the primary and secondary coils.
For this mode of operation, capacitors are much better than conventional batteries. They are able to take charge very quickly and do not show fatigue even after half a million cycles. Capacitors painlessly give (and receive) very large currents. One cell, for example, discharges a current of 400 A in 11.25 s, but can be charged again just as quickly.
The Swiss project for Vampfler is not the first in this area. Since 1998, five road trains operating on the same principle have been transporting tourists to the Vakarevarevsky Geothermal Park in Rotorua (New Zealand). Here it is worth thinking about this. The city bus runs along the route with frequent stops: you can arrange contactless recharging, for example, through one or two stations. While passengers will be replacing each other in the cabin, the capacitors will restore energy - again on the road. The Vampfler option may turn out to be more profitable than trolleybuses tied to the contact network along the entire route. In any case, in Altstatten, Switzerland, a 16-seater Multi-rider with supercapacitors and a contactless charging system has been leaving every 15 minutes for a year from the station to the city center (1.6 km away).
