Powering the drive to electric buses
February 19, 2020
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The Centre for Energy and Power Electronics Research (ePower) at Queen’s University is part of a new cluster of post-secondary institutions receiving funding from the Canadian Urban Transit Research and Innovation Consortium (CUTRIC) to pursue battery electric bus research. CUTRIC is contributing $2.6 million in funding to help achieve the federal government’s ambitious goal of electrifying 5,000 transit buses.
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The funding, along with an additional $132,500 from federal MITACS industrial research program, will support innovative low-carbon and smart mobility research projects at Queen’s University, OCAD University, University of Windsor, and Ontario Tech University, which form CUTRIC’s National Academic Committee on Zero-Emissions Buses (NAC-ZEB).
This work will address the challenges faced by electric buses and help us realize the goal of making them a transit standard.
Suzan Eren, Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Queen’s and a member of ePOWER, and her team are working to optimize the powertrain used in heavy-duty electric buses to pave the way for practical and efficient next-generation electric buses.
“The key technology of this project is innovations in power electronics to revolutionize the design of a new powertrain architecture,” Dr. Eren says. “This work will address the challenges faced by electric buses and help us realize the goal of making them a transit standard.”
This announcement builds on approximately $16 million in federal funding already awarded to the City of Brampton, TransLink, York Region Transit, and Newmarket-Tay Power Distribution Ltd. through Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) to help launch the Pan-Canadian Electric Bus Demonstration & Integration Trial: Phase I.