The center has successfully tested a new wireless energy transfer solution, applicable to charging heavy electric vehicles, faster, and minimizing the impact on street furniture
CIRCE has validated this system in the metallurgical industry, managing to transfer power by induction to 300kW, thanks to its participation in the European NIWE project
The Aragonese technology center CIRCE has just achieved a milestone in the field of wireless energy transfer. The center has developed the first system capable of transferring power wirelessly to 300 kW, which means tripling the capacity reached two years ago.
With this advance, the door opens to the ultra-fast inductive load of heavy electric vehicles, allowing the charging of these vehicles with a 60% reduction in time compared to current systems and without the need to connect any cables. In addition, the system improves the usability to the driver and has a minimal impact on urban infrastructure and furniture to be buried.
This new achievement has been obtained within the framework of the European NIWE project, funded by the European Commission through the Horizon2020 program, and whose trajectory concludes this week after five years of life. Specifically, within this project, the solution developed by CIRCE has been validated in the metallurgical industry by feeding furnaces for iron smelting by induction.
In addition to being able to extend the new inductive load prototype to other industries, its application in the short term is especially designed for charging large electric vehicles – such as trucks or buses – wirelessly for both urban and interurban routes. The operation is based on the circulation of electric current between two coils – one on the ground and another in the vehicle itself -, generating a magnetic field that allows a vehicle to be placed on top of it, which begins to charge without being precise cables or connections. The system, being buried, causes a minimal visual impact on the image of the city and greatly facilitates usability by consumers.
The induction load has a huge field of application, from public transport systems, delivery companies, private homes to the industrial environment, where this type of load facilitates the automation of processes, providing a more stable and robust element that a network of conductive cables.
The solution obtained within the NIWE project is another step that adds to the results achieved in the UNPLUGGED project, in which CIRCE worked until 2015. In it, a modular system was proposed to power 25 kW or 50 kW systems, according to the type of vehicle that accessed the charging system. The progress in this case is that the new solution, more powerful, is specially designed for the heavy vehicle, thus the charging time decreases significantly.