Mahle system chargeBig banks on centralisation
Stuttgart Airport has chosen Mahle to supply the bigCharge system to install 110 charge points for its fleet and electric vehicles from employees. The Mahle system is easy to scale and fit thanks to a centralised charge management unit.
More so, chargeBig is more a case of keeping it small. The central unit manages loads. From here run permanently mounted cables to simple charge points, essentially a column with a plug. The set-up saves Stuttgart Airport time and money otherwise spent on a network connection.
The chargeBIG installation offers single-phase AC with charging outputs ranging between 2.3 and 7.2 kilowatts. The central control unit distributes the charging capacity across the parked vehicles using dynamic, phase-specific load management. This does away with “bottlenecks” that are often “caused by spikes in power delivery rather than the energy that is available. We use intelligent load distribution to take advantage of this situation,” explains Sebastian Ewert, head of project management Europe at Mahle and a member of the chargeBIG team.
Mahle considers the chargeBig solution suited to install charging infrastructure for around 20 to 100 electric vehicles, especially when these park for more extended periods, such as on parking lots at businesses premises or airports.
At Stuttgart Airport, installation of the 110 charging points is well underway together with Mahle partner eliso. The external area and parking facilities are ready, and the charging points are currently being fitted to wall and column mountings on the apron.
As a supplier, Mahle has not yet given up on combustion engines entirely but has increased its e-mobility offering considerably. In the case of chargeBIG, Mahle set it up as a corporate start-up with the specific objective of enabling the rapid development of large scale charging infrastructure. Considering other EV initiatives, Mahle is staying with slower charging but is working to do away with the last cables. The company acquired licenses for WiTricity’s magnetic resonance technology to develop a bi-direction wireless charging system this February as reported.
0 Comments