this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2024
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The high-capacity pantograph charger/gantry is inspired. Since it's so far overhead it would appear to have some durability and safety advantages. I'm guessing that 6 minutes for 50kW is enough for charging in the field at the start/end of a route. Heck, now I'm wondering if you could get a substantial charge in the time it takes to onboard passengers at a stop.
Edit: exercising my position as an armchair engineer, this idea could still work but I think a business focus as making kits for adapting existing EVs to the gantry system, along with manufacturing the gantries themselves, would be way more viable than building entire busses from scratch.
The moving parts of the machine that come down to charge the bus were made by some Italian company, I think. And some of the electric parts that raise the power to the right amount were built by a Romanian company.
We did have capacitors arc and blow up once. Also, the charger itself arced and burned a hole in the metal where the bus parts and pantograph parts made the #-shaped contact.
Before designing electronics, the electrician in charge of the project tried to get a readymade system from ABB. They called him 9 months later to talk about it and he replied "Don't need it anymore. We built our own." And they were like "What do you mean, you built your own?!" π
LOL. With that kind of lead time, they were more or less asking for it.