What Is the Level of People’s Acceptance for Electric Taxis and Buses? Exploring Citizens’ Perceptions of Transportation Electrification to Pay Additional Fees

Electric vehicles (EVs) are gradually addressing the environmental problem in cities created by internal combustion vehicles. However, to be widely used, a major challenge will still have to be tackled. Some significant challenges are the resistance to new technologies and EVs’ purchase cost, which is significantly higher than that of internal combustion vehicles. These challenges are similar to the adoption of EVs for public transportation, such as buses and taxis. Thus, this paper proposes valuable insights into attitudes and preferences for taxi and bus users for the willingness to travel in EVs, by performing a convenience sampling, focusing especially on young users. Moreover, this study highlights the possibility of the users paying additional fees to travel in electric taxis (ETs) or electric buses (EBs). Pearson’s chi-squared analysis was also performed to validate the hypotheses.

A Review of Equivalent Circuit Model Based Online State of Power Estimation for Lithium-Ion Batteries in Electric Vehicles

With rapid transportation electrification worldwide, lithium-ion batteries have gained much attention for energy storage in electric vehicles (EVs). State of power (SOP) is one of the key states of lithium-ion batteries for EVs to optimise power flow, thereby requiring accurate online estimation. Equivalent circuit model (ECM)-based methods are considered as the mainstream technique for online SOP estimation. They primarily vary in their basic principle, technical contribution, and validation approach, which have not been systematically reviewed. This paper provides an overview of the improvements on ECM-based online SOP estimation methods in the past decade. Firstly, online SOP estimation methods are briefed, in terms of different operation modes, and their main pros and cons are also analysed accordingly. Secondly, technical contributions are reviewed from three aspects: battery modelling, online parameters identification, and SOP estimation. Thirdly, SOP testing methods are discussed, according to their accuracy and efficiency. Finally, the challenges and outlooks are presented to inspire researchers in this field for further developments in the future.

Power Electronic Converters for Microgrids

Power electronic converters are indispensable building blocks of microgrids. They are the enabling technology for many applications of microgrids, e.g., renewable energy integration, transportation electrification, energy storage, and power supplies for computing. In this chapter, the requirements, functions, and operation of power electronic converters are introduced. Then, different topologies of the converters used in microgrids are discussed, including DC/DC converters, single-phase DC/AC converters, three-phase three-wire, and four-wire DC/AC converters. The remaining parts of this chapter focus on how to optimally design and control these converters with the emerging wide-bandgap semiconductors. Correlated tradeoffs of converter efficiency, power density, and cost are analyzed using Artificial Neural Networks to find the optimal design of the converters.