Upper Heyford, UK: Electric Assisted Vehicles his working with Denso to make a low voltage E-Cargo bike.
The new EAV2Cool has a 1.4m³ rear compartment chilled to between 2°C – 5°C which can be sustained for 10 hours in 30°C ambient heat.
Denso’s low voltage cloud-connected chiller system is being developed for the project.
“As more urban locations move towards zero emissions, and even the banning of city and town centre traffic altogether, micromobility logistics solutions like the E-Cargo bike have become the ideal solution for the last mile.” said Nesh Cvetkovic, director connected services, Denso International Europe.
“A significant proportion of that last mile traffic requires the option of active cooling that is connected and dynamically traceable, especially with food and pharmaceuticals. To provide this capability, Denso’s innovation team entered into a collaborative engineering programme with EAV, who are the leaders in micromobility solutions, to produce the EAV2Cool.”
The engineering challenges of running a low voltage cooling system which can maintain low temperatures in high ambient heat conditions and remain remotely monitored by operators are not insignificant, EAV says.
It will fit additional batteries to the chassis to provide sustained 40v power to support the 10-hour minimum operation window required by Denso.
“The whole premise of EAV is that we rely on being environmental through lightweight. Our mantra is to achieve more with less, so we’ve been working closely with the specialist engineering teams at Denso to make sure we maintained that weight advantage.” said Adam Barmby, chief executive, Electric Assisted Vehicles.
“We know there’s significant interest in the market for a fully connected actively cooled eCargo vehicle rather than just packing cooled goods into highly insulated packaging and trying to minimise temperature gain. We’re now enthusiastically looking for partners who operate cold chain deliveries or who have a requirement for chilled products distribution, to work with on pilot programmes throughout the summer.
