ElectReon has successfully wirelessly charged a fully electric 40-ton truck and trailer at a test facility in Sweden. The next step will be to charge the truck through dynamic wireless power transfer on a public road in Gotland, Sweden.

The Smartroad Gotland project is the first wireless electric road system (ERS) for trucks and buses on public roads. ERS supports electric power transfer to vehicles while in motion and has the potential to increase energy efficiency with a reduced need of batteries.

The dynamic wireless power transfer (DWPT) system consists of three key elements; the coil transferring energy to a receiver on the vehicle and a management unit controlling the process.

The management unit is connected to the electric grid and transfers energy to copper coils buried 8 cm below the roadway, when a valid vehicle is exactly above. The energy is wirelessly transferred from the coil to a receiver mounted underneath the vehicle. The system makes sure only valid vehicles receive energy and keeps track of how much each customer should pay. A passenger car needs one receiver and a 40-ton truck would use five, but would utilize the same infrastructure.

Smartroad Gotland is supported and funded by the Swedish Road Administration and is led by ElectReon AB, a Swedish subsidiary of the Israeli company ElectReon Wireless. The goal of the project is to prove that ElectReon’s technology is ready for commercialization and to provide decision makers with knowledge necessary for large-scale ERS deployment.

ElectReon’s wireless power transfer solution has previously been implemented and tested at the company’s test facility in Beit Yanai, Israel. The company has now built a test facility near Stockholm at the facility of NCC, one of the largest construction companies in the Nordic region and one of ElectReon’s partners in the demo project Smartroad Gotland.

The purpose of the new test facility was to integrate and test the full ElectReon system with management unit, coils, and receivers before operations starts on the public road of Gotland. Five receivers were installed on the trailer of an electric truck, Sweden’s first fully electric 40-ton truck. The test took place in winter conditions, with temperatures around zero C.

The results showed that the system successfully charged the electric truck statically through wireless power transfer. The system was activated and supervised remotely enabling management of all relevant charging and metering parameters. The receivers transmitted about 20 kW each with an efficiency of about 90%.

ElectReon recently received a review on electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) tests that was performed in a lab environment in Tel Aviv. The review was done by five Swedish agencies and showed that the system is ready to be operated on public roads. To verify these results in a real environment, RISE Research Institute of Sweden performeded a EMC and EMF test on the test site. The preliminary results verified the previous satisfactory results from the lab.

With the integration tests now conducted, the truck is ready for dynamic charging on public roads in the beginning of March. This will mark the first truck operations on a public wireless electric road system. The truck will run on the first stretch of electric road that was prepared in November 2019. During 2020 further infrastructure will be deployed to a total of 1.6 km electric road on a 4 km road stretch.

Partners of the Smartroad Gotland project are: Caverion; Dan Transport; Eitech; Electreon AB; Flygbussarna; GEAB; Gotland GPe Circuit AB; Gotlands Bilfrakt; Hutchinson; Matters Group; Eksjö Maskin & Truck; Region Gotland; NCC; OSAB; RISE; Science Park Gotland; Swedavia; Trafikverket; and the World Ecological Forum.