Autonomous Charging of Electric Vehicles in Industrial Environment

Modern industrial manufacturing involves several manually and automated driven vehicles - not only for logistics and production purposes, but also for services, maintenance, resources supply and cleaning. These different types of vehicles are increasingly driven by electric powertrains that operate in the production halls, warehouses and other involved areas. Today, electric charging of these mobile devices is accomplished mainly manually and by use of a number of different not standardized charging interfaces, which leads to increased time and cost efforts. The paper evaluates different charging technologies for the use in industrial environments and introduces a new approach for automated, robot-controlled charging of electric vehicles, which is based on a standardized charging interface. The technology has been developed to fully automated charge different types of cars and other vehicles and consists of a vision system to identify the vehicle and the charging connector position in combination with a fully-controlled robotic system that plugs-in and -off the charging connector. In this way, the system is universally applicable for different types of autonomously and manually driven vehicles in a professional context, e.g. in production, logistics and warehouses

Sustainable product development: Provision of information in early automotive engineering phases

Sustainable product development is an important influencing factor in automotive engineering, whereby a comprehensive evaluation of its efforts and benefits is very complex. In addition, lots of information is not available in advance of mass production. This leads to the question, how results from impact assessment can be transferred to the beginning of the development process, where important decisions about product and production characteristics are made. The present paper discusses approaches for life cycle estimation and decision support in the concept phase of automotive engineering, especially focusing on the design engineer’s requirements. It includes an overview of current development processes and discusses by use of examples different approaches to integrate relevant information concerning sustainable product development in development processes

Greenhouse Gas Emissions of Electric Cars - A Comprehensive Evaluation

As an important trend in the automotive industry, electrification of propulsion systems has potential to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions of the transportation sector. Whereas electric vehicles do not produce exhaust emissions during driving, the impact of electricity provision for charging the batteries as well as the impact of vehicle production play an essential role in a holistic consideration of the carbon footprint. The paper introduces a comprehensive evaluation of greenhouse gas emission-related factors of battery-electric cars, considering the entire product life cycle. This comprises vehicle production, including battery system, electric powertrain and other relevant components, the car’s use phase under consideration of different electricity mixes, user patterns and the end-of-life phase. The results of the study can serve as a basis for comparison with the characteristics of cars driven by conventional propulsion systems and allow a detailed discussion of the different technologies, especially under consideration of future development trends

Life-Cycle CO2-Equivalent Emissions of Cars Driven by Conventional and Electric Propulsion Systems

As an important trend in the automotive industry, electrification of propulsion systems has potential to significantly reduce greenhouse-gas emissions of the transportation sector. Whereas electric vehicles do not produce exhaust emissions during driving, the impact of electricity provision for charging batteries, as well as the impact of vehicle production play an essential role in a holistic consideration of the carbon footprint. The paper introduces a comprehensive evaluation of greenhouse gas-emission-related factors of cars driven by different propulsion technologies, considering the entire product life cycle. This comprises vehicle production, including battery system, electric powertrain and other relevant components, the car’s use phase under consideration of different electricity mixes and the end-of-life phase. The results of the study give insights of influencing factors on life-cycle-related carbon-dioxide-equivalent emissions of cars driven by combustion engines, hybrid powertrains and battery-electric propulsion systems. In addition, a comparison of actual mass-production cars is made and the total life-cycle carbon footprints are discussed under different boundary conditions of electric power supply. In this way, the article comprehensively introduces an automotive life-cycle assessment and provides fundamental information, contributing to an objective discussion of different propulsion technologies