Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Technology and Advanced Materials IFAMSmart charging management for electric vehicles – test environment at Fraunhofer IFAM
Charging electric vehicle fleets at companies or public institutions without smart charging management can result in enormous costs or even overload the grid connection. To avoid this, the industry is turning to “smart charging.” This allows charging processes to be controlled in a way that meets demand and optimizes costs.
The real laboratory at Fraunhofer IFAM offers the opportunity to test, analyze, and specifically refine such solutions under real-world conditions
The mobility industry is in a state of flux: the number of electric cars on the roads is steadily increasing, and more and more companies are also converting their fleets and company cars to electric mobility. The companies are faced with the question of what technical options are available to provide as many charging points as possible for their employees' e-vehicles with limited (physical as well as economic) building connection power. One answer is to integrate an intelligent charging management system.
But this is not the end of the story: due to the multitude of possible components of a (building) energy system, such as photovoltaic and wind power systems, electrochemical storage systems, heat generators running on hydrogen or other fuels, etc., the digital interconnection of the components as well as the knowledge of the historical as well as forecasted generation and consumption data of these components and the building load is mandatory.
Intelligent charging of electric vehicles
Based on this data, an intelligent charging management system, linked to a local energy management system, can carry out the charging processes of the e-vehicles in the best possible way. The following added values result:
- Maximization of the number of charging points
- Better utilization of the installed components
- On-demand charging with 100% user satisfaction
- Compliance with available (physical or economic) grid connection capacities
- Maximization of own power consumption rate
- Minimization of total costs
Real laboratory at Fraunhofer IFAM
Within the last ten years, Fraunhofer IFAM has built up a real laboratory with different charging stations (27 AC charging points with max. 11/22kW each & 2 DC charging points with max. 50kW each), storage systems (Redox-Flow, LFP, NMC, Pb, ZEBRA; total capacity approx. 200kWh) and photovoltaic systems (capacity approx. 25kWp).
This real laboratory is therefore particularly suitable for grid operators and energy suppliers as well as manufacturers of energy management systems as well as charging stations, storage systems or photovoltaic systems. They can use their products to test their own issues under real conditions. For this purpose, the reallab can be individually adapted and used according to possibility.
With the help of the real lab, Dr. Stefan Lösch's "Smart Energy & Data" group is researching the interaction of energy management systems, charging infrastructure, storage systems and photovoltaic systems.
You want to test your product on this topic under real conditions? We would be happy to customize our real lab according to your individual specifications within the scope of what is feasible. Please contact us!