Plans for a small bus conversion

Hello guys
I've Been asked to make a survey plan to convert an Iveco small bus from a local transportation company. It is a 2000 model.
Would like to get ideas on the power train, batteries, and everything could be useful for the project and comes from your minds, knowledge, experience.

The Bus is actually powered by a 100Kw (@2700 rpm) CommonRail Iveco Diesel engine (4liters 4Cyl. turbointercooler 300Kg) with 420Nm @1200rpm
Weights empty is actually 7500Kg and 9500Kg full loaded.
It actually serves a circular urban route of 8 Km for 18 times a day with a single terminus where there is a 22Kw Type2 EU charger station (eventually upgradable) for a total of 150km/day and 35.000 km/year.

The Italian law, allows to retrofit an electric system over any Type approved ICE vehicle (except motorbikes, sigh ) without the need of a new approval, but only an update of the Vehicle Documents. That is valid only if the The electric propulsion kit is yet approved by the local transportation authorities, and installed by a certified shop, and obviously must comply with all the local and UE rules about safety, EM emissions, environmental emissions ecc.

The Idea is pretty much like what happens here for LPG or natural gas retrofits: A LPG or N.G. manufacturer of a retrofit kit, gets an approval by the authorities for a kit to be installed in a category or type or model of engine and than the installer directly update the vehicle documents after the installation without the need of a specific type approval and can be applied to any ICE car-bus-truck vehicle registered in Italy, old or new, without the need of an agreement by the original manufacturer.

The Conversion must be a full plug-in conversion with the total swap of the ICE engine and no hybrids or highly modified vehicles (like 2x4 to 4x4 or hubmotor wheels) are admitted.
The converted vehicle must be powered by an electric propulsion (1 or more engines and their systems) with a max power (max sust.power for 3minutes, reduced by 20%) range between 80 and 100% of the original ICE.
Mass balance, total mass, brakes, safety and comfort devices and systems and possibly part or all the gearbox must be held in place to have more chances for the approval during the technical certification test.

There are only few companies here that are trying to play the game but it is a 2016 regulation so hopefully more actors will try to take advantages from that opportunity in the next years.

Would be good to find a power-train manufacturer that would like to join us in this project, we can provide support to obtain the certification by the Italian authorities, logistics and the needed authorized installer shop to complete the chain.

Batteries are as always the most sensible part of the plan.

Although we have our ideas, we would really appreciate any point, advice or even proposal inside or outside the box by any of you guys, I joined the E-S community 5 years ago, and I well know how awesome, competent and smart most of your mind are......

I can provide more details if needed.

Cheers

If it has to be a kit, and has to be one approved by the local authorities, then the first thing you'd have to do is contact them for a list of approved kits, and then post that list here so someone can help you figure out which one, if any, is suitable for this vehicle and usage.

My guess is that there are no such kits, so you'd have to find out from them what they *will* approve, meaning, what are the exact requirements the local authority will use to determine approval of the parts you will have to use to do the conversion. Then find parts that are suitable and available and meet those requirements.

It would suck to find everything you need, do the conversion, then have them say "nope, sorry, we just don't like this part. Or this one. Or this one over here." :/



Keep in mind that for a bus in usage like this, it's going to need to be able to accelerate quickly to it's normal cruising speed from a complete stop very frequently (wherever there are bus stops and wherever there are traffic controls or other things buses usually have to stop for--here in the US that's often a number of cross-traffic situations that other vehicles don't have to stop for).


That means most likley higher cooling requirements, larger battery pack, and possibly bigger controller/motor than other vehicles of the same size would probably need for the same range/etc.

thanks Amber for your reply.
The good is that the regulation is pretty precise and covers almost everything in terms of power and peed range (80-100%) total mass (115%) and front rear mass distribution (-+ 10% compared to the original) plus all safety and comfort devices and subsystems have to be maintained (abs, servos, heater, AC, airbags, pertensioner ecc.) Also the OBD interface has to be maintained so the original MBB must stay there and all the sensor systems must be managed to work or to not interfere with the system works.
basically a standard motor swap at the block level should be accepted.
You are right. when precedent certifications are done the process will be much easier for the next requesting subjects.But in these 10 months nobody has certified one, though, at least in that segment.
Anyway it is only a survey at the moment but I would like to roughly figure out a range of possible costs....

Then your first task is to determine how much power will be needed to at least meet the original fully loaded acceleration rate from a stop to cruising speed. That's probably the most important thing, so that schedules can be maintained, and other traffic is not impacted any differently than it was before.


Then the power for cruising at speed should be determined, so you know what the constant power it must sustain is.

Then determine the amount of time each of those will happen on the route and shift, and you can determine both wh/km and total wh usage for a certain amount of time on the route, and then add some overhead for weather/detours. That will help you size the battery, and charger (knowing how fast it will have to recharge to get back on the route).

You'll also know what the continous wattage the system must put out will be, as well as the burst (and how long the bursts last), which will help you size teh motor itself, and the controller.