Abstract
The use of Electric Vehicles, whose range is and will remain limited to about 100 km for quite a while, is well adapted to the majority of the daily urban and sub-urban commuting journeys which are made on small distances, not exceeding 50 km.. Unfortunately, a large number of drivers is going to refuse electric vehicles because they fear having to do a longer distance occasionally without any possibility of recharging their car. If the E.V. manufacturers could propose at an affordable price a Range Extender, able to multiply the range by a factor two or three in the areas where Zero Emission is not demanded, it could be an easy way to overcome this handicap, and hook many people into buying an E.V.for the daily use.
A Range Extender mainly consists in an electric generator (EG), with related Power Electronics, driven by an Internal Combustion Engine (ICE), working in the optimum conditions to maintain gaseous and acoustic emissions at its lowest level.
In the present paper are reported the differences between an EV equipped with a R.E. and a conventional Hybrid Electric Vehicle (HEV), the basic hypothesis for its sizing to fulfill the specifications in terms of mileage extension in different driving conditions, the problems for the prototype development, as well as some results of the test performed on test bench.
The research activity is carried on within a BRITE EURAM funded project, by a Consortium of different european companies: Centro Ricerche FIAT, BRD and Lombardini (in Italy), Renault and Thomson/Auxilec (in France), Siemens (in Germany) and University of Sheffield (in the United Kingdom).