The benefits of public transport on ultracapacitors
The ultracapacitor is an extremely promising source of energy not only for mobile devices and individual vehicles. Today, capacitor technologies are already being introduced in the field of public transport. Including such vehicles are jointly developed by Chinese and American companies.
EDLC as an energy source for electric vehicles allows you to solve several problems at once. Firstly, the problem of dependence on wires disappears. A trolley bus is not able to go around a serious obstacle, unlike an electric bus. Secondly, attempts to create public transport on batteries over and over again crashed due to the high weight and high cost of batteries. If you save on batteries, then the mileage was too low.
EDLC helped to get out of this vicious circle. They weigh significantly less batteries, and at the same time they can be recharged at stops. When boarding and disembarking passengers, the bus puts forward “horns” that connect to the contact network. If the batteries cannot absorb large currents and require a long time to charge, then supercapacitors are able to quickly gain enough energy to move to the next stop. Of course, the specific capacity of such cells is much worse than that of lithium batteries. However, in this case, the determining factor is the ability to quickly charge.
The capacitor bus charges at the bus stop for a couple of minutes. Such indicators were demonstrated by this transport in Shanghai even 7-8 years ago. The bus ultracapacitor allows it to travel up to 8-9 km. This is enough to overcome the distance between stops on the city route. In addition, air conditioning can work in the cabin. It consumes almost the same amount of energy as a traction electric motor, which significantly reduces mileage. However, in most cases, it remains quite enough.
There is only one reason that does not allow the public transport sector to massively switch to a supercapacitor - to buy it will be more difficult and more expensive than conventional batteries. However, the technology is developing, and experts say that these batteries with the possibility of frequent recharging are more suitable not for electric vehicles, namely for public transport.
