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Daimler equips Mannheim bus plant with new central electric charging station for eCitaro

Daimler Buses has equipped its Mannheim bus plant with a central charging station for the fully-electric eCitaro. It can also be used to provide the newly released eCitaro with electricity via a pantograph. The special feature of this charging station is that the charging devices are suspended at a height of around five meters above the ground.

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The station serves to charge the eCitaro as part of the production process and ahead of delivery to customers. Plus, new charging technologies such as charging management, new communications protocols, new hardware for charging using a cable or a roof-mounted pantograph can be tried and tested. The infrastructure is expandable as required.

The charging station is compatible with all common charging technologies: 150 kW cable-bound charging, 300 kW rapid charging using a pantograph on the bus roof and 300 kW rapid charging using a permanently installed set of charging rails on the roof of the bus (inverted pantograph).

All four parking bays are setup to handle the particularly common cable-bound charging of the eCitaro. And in line with this, it can handle the different charging systems of two manufacturers. Using them, buses can be charged with an output of 150 kW.

Two parking bays additionally offer rapid charging via the vehicle roof; one uses a pantograph, the other uses charging rails. In both cases, the charging output is 300 kW. The entire system has a modular design to ensure that it can be expanded as required.

The total connection power at the charging station is a 1.2 megawatts. The corresponding cables are roughly as thick as a human arm and run in an extendible cable channel in the ground.

As space in the bus plant is at a premium, Mercedes-Benz has decided to move off the ground, installing the eCitaro charging station at the height of the upper floor of the building—an idea which many transport companies also use. It doesn’t just save space, it also protects against costly accidents between maneuvering buses and the charging technology.

The electric charging station is located directly behind the vehicle handover hall and thus has a strategically interesting location. To save electrically-powered city buses from having to carry out complex maneuvering, the charging station has been built in a space-saving way to resemble a bridge. The city buses drive straight under the charging station and park right there for charging.

Comments

SJC

I prefer charging from below.

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