Electric Vehicle Bus Systems

Pure electric buses (EBs) present an alternative in the transit bus arena and are being manufactured and sold by several US companies. In this project, an electric bus fleet (Tallahassee StarMetro's five electric bus fleet) was investigated as a case study. For the study, the implementing strategy, route distance and timing, charging times, fuel economy, impact of type of chargers, maintenance and operational characteristics of the EB fleet were analyzed and the results were compared with the StarMetro diesel bus fleet. The operational results showed that the electrical demand charge was a large contributor to the electricity costs. From this result, an energy consumption model was developed to simulate the fuel economy of the EBs for any given driving cycle. The model was used to study the impact of routes and EB charging strategies on demand charges. An objective function was created to search for the optimal charging strategy that minimizes demand charges. The EB charging strategy showed that an optimization based on the battery state of charge will result in a 41% electricity cost savings for a five EB fleet over 12 years operational period. The EB charging strategy can be easily adopted by transit agencies without added hardware costs. Future project activities will be to apply the EB energy consumption model and the charging strategy model to different electric transit bus systems with different driving cycles and routes.

• Record URL:
  http://evtc.fsec.ucf.edu/research/project14.html

Language

• English

Project

• Status: Active
• Funding: $225126.00
• Contract Numbers:

  DTRT13-G-UTC51

• Sponsor Organizations:

  Research and Innovative Technology Administration

  University Transportation Centers Program
  1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE
  Washington, DC  United States  20590
• Project Managers:

  Block, David

• Performing Organizations:

  University of Central Florida, Orlando

  P.O. Box 25000
  Orlando, FL  United States  32816
• Principal Investigators:

  Raissi, Ali

• Start Date: 20131001
• Expected Completion Date: 0
• Actual Completion Date: 20180930
• Source Data: RiP Project 36188

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Bus routes; Electric buses; Electric vehicle charging; Location; Maintenance; Operating costs
• Geographic Terms: Tallahassee (Florida)
• Subject Areas: Energy; Highways; Public Transportation; Vehicles and Equipment; I15: Environment;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01562877
• Record Type: Research project
• Source Agency: Electric Vehicle Transportation Center
• Contract Numbers: DTRT13-G-UTC51
• Files: UTC, RIP
• Created Date: May 13 2015 1:00AM