Regenerative braking in scooters - is it worth it?

Regenerative braking in scooters - is it worth it?

Boukens, M.J.M.

Rusák, Z. (mentor)
Flipsen, S.F.J. (mentor)

Industrial Design Engineering

Design Engineering

2013-07-23

This graduation project focused on the scooter. Scooters offer cheap, flexible and reliable transport. However, their emissions are quite high. This leads to the problem description for this project: energy efficiency in current scooters is not as high as it can be. A lot of improvement can be gained in the vehicles efficiency by regenerating brake energy. Regeneration of this energy may lead to less fuel consumption, but also to lower emissions. In this project a prototype of a hybrid scooters was designed to deliver a proof of principle that confirms this assumption. Before prototyping was started, a study is conducted into the behavior of drivers. The results show that scooter drivers coast far more than they brake. For the scooter driver it has more priority to maintain speed during a trip, than to sprint from traffic light to traffic light. This study also shows that during braking about 9% of the energy that is needed to make a drive, can be regenerated. A prototype has been made to test the concept in practice. The tests show that the hybrid scooter can regenerate, store and utilize energy. Difficulties occurred in the cooperation between the capacitors and the motor controller. Regeneration at full power was therefore impossible. This leads to the conclusion of the project, which is a story with two sides. On the one hand, it is confirmed that the prototypes functions work. However, the prototype does not meet the expectations. The reason for this is that the motor controller can not handle this application. Therefore a full custom controller should be developed for application in the hybrid scooter. A controller without compromises may be able to show promising result. Returning to the research question it can be confirmed that an improvement in energy efficiency can be gained, but a statement of the size of this percentage can not be made.

Regenerative Braking scooter
energy efficiency

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:a7e1e00a-fa5e-478c-8056-ac03044e6e73

2014-07-23

Campus only

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2013 Boukens, M.J.M.