idea Owners
Solar-powered cargobikes are suitable for shopkeepers in crowded cities and for developing countries. The engine helps especially when you have to overcome some hills on your way to market and while selling your goods you can let the battery recharge to bring you conveniently back home for free. You can easily avoid traffic-jams and park your cargo everywhere. You can also use bike paths, take shortcuts and improve your karma by using a zero-emission transport method even if you could not carry all your goods on a regular bike.
Solar-powered cargobikes are the answer for sustainable small-scale cargo transport in crowded cities and for developing countires. Our prototype can safely transport up to 60kg load for 30km for single charge if you pedal just a little.
Why is it sustainable?
- Zero-emission transport and free recharge during selling goods or parking
- Rleatively cheap and easily repairable mean of transport
- Lowers the needless traffic of cars with single driver
- Takes negligible parking space in city centre when compared to cars
- Drives at speed safe for cities and thus prevents fatal injuries
- Even narrow or low-quality roads are no problem
- You are allowed to use bike-paths, avoid traffic jams or take shortcuts
E-bikes are becoming common as well as cheap solar panels so where is the innovation?
We adapted our solution to needs of our target group - shopkeepers, who run a small kiosk and bring their goods to market daily. They don't need to transport a huge load and they don't want to be stuck in traffic jams. They want flexibility of a bike, but they do not want to be all sweaty when they get to market. They want to park anywhere and need access to their storage space all the time. Sometimes a car can't offer this and for such cases we developed our Solar-Powered Cargobike concept. There are many small details that only praxis could teach us which make it a reliable and versatile working tool - a modern equivalent of merchant's horse.
Prototype technical information:
- Safe load capacity: 60kg (depends on load placement, "centroid")
- Driving distance for single charge on flat land: 30km
- Travelling speed at which motor still helps: 20km/h
- Motor: 250W (power can be chosen according to typical terrain)
- Battery capcaity: 280Wh (you do not discharge it fully)
- Used solar panel: 60W (foldable construction possible for higher power)
- Price: 1500EUR (depending on quality of used parts)
Arachne Aerospace has ambition to bring solar travellers into the clouds, but we decided to start small and first solve small-scale cargo transportation.
Our prototype has travelled 700km during summer 2016 while withstanding heavy testing conditions. It allows to transport a keg of beer to an outdoor party in hardly accessible terrain or a small kiosk with goods to local market. Would you like to open a small ice cram kiosk with solar-powered cooler in the middle of a bike path leading through beautiful scenery, where you can't go with a car or a moped? Our solution is suited exactly for you!
A tricycle construction would also be interesting for the future, but bicycle has better maneuverability and offers advantages in traffic jams or crowded areas. Thus we decided to start with a bicycle to test viability of this concept and if there is sufficient demand, we could build also tricycles for customers who need to transport larger loads but still would like to stay light and zero-emission.
We are looking for partners to help us bring this concept to large scale.
Comments
Dear Jan and team,
great project, thank you for posting it !!!
Thank you Ursula for your response. Please let me know if we should add more information. As I mentioned in the project description, our vision leads much further although currently we focus on small scale end experimenting with the prototype to gain valuable data for further development.
I can imagine that solar-powered trikes with a light frame possibly made form bamboo could be a great solution for developing countries. We would be only supplying a solar set with manuals and establishing a network of technicians who would build and repair such vehicles in local workshops. We do not want to create a big centralized corporation and ship our bikes across the world to maximize profit. Our goal is to promote sustainability and thus we should adhere to basic sustainability principles:
We shall maximize recyclability of components and repairability of the product. The product should be built locally preferably from local materials to minimize transportation and the business model should focus on creating local jobs which would further raise reliablity of final product and boost local economy.
We want to establish a decentralized purpose-driven company, with aspects of self-organization. We want to stay low-budget and invest heavily only in the parts of sourcing and manufacturing process where it brings biggest benefits.
Depending on the feedback we can elaborate this vision further. It is hopefully clear what do we want to achieve and in context of basic sustainability principles defined by TheNaturalStep framework, the optimal solution is obvious :)
http://www.thenaturalstep.org/our-approach/
Dear Jan, thanks. For the moment I think the information is sufficient and very clear.
I will let you know, if there are any questions. Thank you very much !
Why not just batteries and fuel cells and leave the battery charging to solar powered stations? Fuel cell/batter hybrids do well to address range. Fuel cells are quick to fuel and have a smaller carbon footprint than even batteries charged from the grid.
Fuel cell technology is expensive when compared to a cheap solar panel which is enough to charge the battery for the way back, especially in the case of shop keepers who need to park their cargo most of the day on one place. You would also need to have a tank for storing hydrogen which would have to fulfill strict safety measures.
Fuel cell technology is good for cars, not for cheap city cargobikes.
A solar powered charging station is a nice idea, but it would need a large surface. Generally a roof of a parking lot is not big enough to charge the parked cars.
Taking a cheap and light panel with a smal MPPT unit is the best option for flexible small-scale cargo mobility.
I hope this answeres your question :)
"Fuel cell technology is expensive when compared to a cheap solar panel which is enough to charge the battery for the way back, especially in the case of shop keepers who need to park their cargo most of the day on one place. You would also need to have a tank for storing hydrogen which would have to fulfill strict safety measures."
Parked most of the day in one place? Fast charge from the grid, a solar station or a ebike charging station-- SWM in Munich, Aldi-Süd etc. But when not parked? Range gets important..
I'm not a great fan of fuel cells versus batteries but I do see their use case for commercial cargo ebikes. Linde has been investing in infrastructure-- one can say the last try-- both with the BeeZero car sharing program and the H2 bike. While batteries have a large number of advantages current fast chargers are still quite slow-- batteries are typically designed to limit current under 7A. With 10 Ah batteries that means a charge can take a few hours. That 10 Ah battery might take a long time to fast charge but won't offer that much range-- sufficient for perhaps a city hopper but too limited for a lot of cargo applications . The Linde H2 bike claims, by contrast, to offer 100 km range with a 34g charge of hydrogen and a refueling time of under 6 minutes. Their carbon foorprints depend upon the means to produce the hydrogen and distribute it and the means of producing batteries (typically but not always Lithium based chemistry) and producing the electricity (grid, cells etc.) to charge to the batttery. The H2 approach tends to have a significantly higher cost/km-- alone on the basis of energy efficiency-- but this, I suggest, might be offset by the utility in this application. H2 cargo bikes I suspect have an easier path to adoption than battery backed by some outboard semi flexible panel. They are also still pretty expensive. A 220 watt panel.. still means hours to charge a single battery..
Our use-case is clear : short route through city, to park your kiosk on a place where no charger is available and then recharge for couple hours, while your cargo is always close to you. Long charging time is not a problem for shop keepers, as well as limited travelling distance. For longer routes with larger cargo, you woul duse a car (possibly H2 powered or a Tesla) but that is totally different price range and lacks all the benefits of moving your kiosk by bike, that I mention in the project description.
Regular H2 bike (not a cargo version) costs approximately 4000EUR, that is more than twice our price, while H2 infrastructure is still very rare Europe (only one H2 stattion in Czech Republic) and it might take decades before it is common in developing countries which we see as a potential market.
Yes you can also recharge the bike from grid, but the panel gives you freedom to recharge everywhere which is useful for people who have to wait by their kiosk when sellign goods anyway. That's the point of our use-case.
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