Summary
Purdue engineers and the Indiana Department of Transportation are working to make it possible for electric vehicles ranging from tractor-trailers to passenger cars to wirelessly charge. Construction is in progress on a quarter-mile test bed on U.S. Highway 231/U.S., Highway 52 in West Lafayette. The team will use it to test how well a patent-pending system provides power to a heavy-duty electric truck traveling at highway speeds.
Purdue University has designed a wireless charging system for heavy-duty trucks. The system is intended to work at power levels much higher than what has been demonstrated in the U.S. so far.
Purdue researchers will test how well a system they designed can provide power to this heavy-duty Cummins truck while it travels at highway speeds. If electric heavy- duty trucks could charge or maintain their state-of-charge using highways, their batteries could be smaller in size and they could carry more cargo.
Purdue researchers have designed a wireless wireless charging system for heavy-duty trucks. The system would be installed in specially dedicated lanes underneath normal concrete pavement and send power to receiver coils attached to the underside of a vehicle. Other wireless EV charging efforts are also using transmitter and receiver coils, but they haven’t been designed for the higher power levels that heavy- duty trucks need.
The team has completed testing of how well 20-foot-long sections of concrete and asphalt could handle heavy loads with the transmitter coils embedded. The team’s partnerships are not just in Indiana, but also throughout the country.
ASPIRE’s members at Purdue and Cummins are also leading a project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy to develop an EV charging and hydrogen fueling plan for medium-duty and heavy-duty trucks. The corridor serves Indiana, Illinois and Ohio.
The team hopes that the results of their experiments could help convince the industry that electrified highways could work. “We are Purdue University, where the difficult is done today and the impossible takes a bit longer,” Haddock said.
