Dear Members of the IEEE Transportation Electrification Community,

It is my pleasure to join the Community’s eNewsletter team as the new Editor-in-Chief and to join efforts with several Associate Editors and Authors to bring you selected articles and announcements on transportation electrification. This is a time when transportation electrification is of global interest due to increasing climate change concerns which transportation electrification will help reduce. Along with exciting achievements and innovations in energy conversion, energy efficiency, energy storage, control, communication, and instrumentation in electrified transportation, many challenges remain to be addressed by researchers, innovators, and engineers, especially those in the IEEE Transportation Electrification Community (TEC). Challenges such as cyber-security in vehicular applications, safety, reliability, packaging, and many others should be addressed.

By Philip Krein, Chair, IEEE Transportation Electrification Community

Sometimes it seems as though the problems associated with autonomous vehicles are not effectively posed.  Much of the literature seems to emphasize questions along the lines of

“How can an autonomous vehicle successfully negotiate traffic and obstacles to move from point A to point B?”

This, in essence, is a robotics challenge, and reflects impressive advances in robotics over the last few years.  It sounds good, but consider a different statement:

“How can a vehicle be made to function substantially better and more safely than with any human driver, over the full range of its intended application and emergency situations?”

By:  Berker Bilgin, 2016 General Chair

Every year in June, ITEC brings academia, industry, government agencies, and the general public together to discuss the advancements, opportunities, and challenges in transportation electrification – one of the most important technological, social, and economical transformative shifts of the next century. ITEC aims at helping the industry transition from conventional vehicles to advanced electrified vehicles including heavy-duty and off-road vehicles, airplanes and ships.

By: Leandros A. Maglaras, et all

Electric Vehicles [EVs] have the potential to reduce carbon emissions, local air pollution and the reliance on imported oil [1]. The European commission aims to reduce road transport emissions by 70% by 2050 [2]. Dynamic wireless charging of electric vehicles [3] could become a preferred method since it would enable power exchange between the vehicle and the grid while the vehicle is moving ubiquitously. Mobile energy disseminators (MED) are a new concept [4], [5] that can facilitate EVs to extend their range in a typical urban scenario. Our proposed method exploits Inter-Vehicle (IVC) communications in order to eco-route electric vehicles taking advantage of the existence of MEDs. Combining modern communications between vehicles and state of the art technologies on energy transfer, vehicles can extend their travel time without the need for large batteries or extremely costly infrastructure.

Millions of physically impaired people completely rely on wheelchairs for their indoor and outdoor mobility. For some developing countries, such as Bangladesh, the most available wheelchairs are driven manually by physically disabled people. Even though these three or four wheeled manual wheelchairs have emerged as blessing for them but there is no overlooking of the substantial amount of physical force that needs to be exerted by the physically handicapped people with their bare hands to turn the wheels of the manual wheelchairs [1, 2]. One of the drawbacks of using the manually driven wheelchair is that the occupant experiences severe pain and repetitive strain injury (RSI) of the upper extremities [3]. Hence, prolonged usage of the manually driven wheelchairs can cause shoulder pain and lead to musculoskeletal injury. Considering the stressful and miserable condition that are being experienced by the disabled people using traditional wheelchairs [4], the Control & Applications Research Centre (CARC)* of BRAC University has conducted a research on designing and developing a three-wheeler electric wheelchair using the throttle and torque sensor pedal along with dedicated Solar Charger Kit (SCK).


About the Newsletter

Editors-in-Chief

Jin-Woo Ahn
Co-Editor-in-Chief

 

Sheldon Williamson
Co-Editor-in-Chief

TEC Call for Articles 2023 - Advances in Charging Systems

The TEC eNewsletter is now being indexed by Google Scholar and peer-reviewed articles are being submitted to IEEE Xplore.

To submit an article click here.