sustainable urban mobility based on renewable energy

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Recuperation of electrical power in public urban transportation networks

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Posted by Bernhard Terjung on 16-10-2016 - Last updated on 17-10-2016

Electrical power has been used in public transportation for more than 120 years. The usual voltage in urban networks (trams, subways, trolleybuses) is 600 up to 750 V DC. The vehicles use electric brakes by switching the motors to generators, with the generated power traditionally mostly being used for the heating and otherwise being "burned" through resistors. Recuperation of the generated power is already partly being used and fed back into the network to back up the mains voltage supply of the tramway or subway network itself. One example in Cologne is a recuperation station in Porz-Ensen which uses the brake energy of tramcars in motion to reduce the voltage loss on the far end of the line to Zündorf. This recuperation station is based on a flywheel priciple. A surplus of brake energy drives the flywheel, which than can convert its immanent kinetic energy to electrical energy again. This recuperation principle could be used to a much larger extent. I suggest to build more recuperation stations throughout a transportation network. The locations of these recuperation stations will in turn be the car sharing stations with electric cars and plug sockets for E-Bikes or other indvidually used vehicals with electric drives. As a result the brake energy of trams and subways becomes a power supply for not only the rail system itself but also for a large variety of electric vehicles used in the urban area.

 

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