Quick Battery Changing Station

[popacapstone]

Hello,

We are a senior design group at Georgia Tech, for our project we are developing a system that take a discharged battery from an electric motorcycle and replace it with a charged on. We are looking for input from current electric motorcycle riders. There is a survey link below:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=dGZFeVBjaVRkb29ya3YycWFJNlFFdXc6MQ#gid=0

Thank you

[protomech]

Hey, welcome to the forum. 04 comp eng graduate here. To Hell with Georgia and all that : P

Is your design group (or class) tracking and detailing their projects online? That would be pretty neat to watch from afar.

Battery swap is a great idea (gas-like "refuel" duration) with some HUGE practical limitations. To wit:
* standardizing on pack access and a small set of battery packs in a rapidly evolving industry that's currently producing fixed-pack bikes (Brammo) or proprietary quick-swap (Zero) bikes
* packs are worth several thousand dollars, securing inventory for an automated system is non-trivial
* bikes already provide commute-class ranges, many would never use the battery swap infrastructure or only very rarely
* all packs are not equal - a damaged, misbalanced or heavily used pack would be an unfortunate replacement for a previous known-good pack, especially if a customer uses the swap service only a couple times a year
* battery packs could be abused under a customer's care and then exchanged

Project Better Place is trying this with automobile packs, which seem like even more of a tough nut. So far they haven't had much success. I'd love to see a reasonable financial argument for such a system, since it does solve the range issue if well-implemented.

[HighlanderMWC]

I agree with a lot of proto's points. I definitely see this as a technology/industry that would need to be proven out for cars first. A motorcycle is a much harder platform for a generic system. Extra weight has much more of an impact, and in order to keep the batteries from being abused both performance and range would need to be severely limited. Furthermore I don't think there's enough empirical data on battery pack lifetimes as used in motorcycles which means and swap business is taking a huge chance economically. Add to that the relative scarcity of elmotos and this enterprise would look extremely risky.