2023-06-06 03:01:00
Silent, without vibrations or carbon dioxide emissions, this noon began to circulate through the city of La Plata the first electric bus in the country. The vehicle originally had a conventional engine and was converted thanks to a public-private partnership between the public passenger transport company Nueve de Julio and the Faculty of Engineering of the University of La Plata (UNLP). Its development required $250,000 investment, half of what an imported one costs. It is the first bus with lithium batteries developed in the country, at a time of key debate on the exploitation of the resource in the country.
It took 18 months of work to convert a vehicle that originally had a conventional engine into one with electric propulsion with lithium batteries. It is the first of its kind in Argentina and has a range of 200 km. Once the SUBE card reading machine is installed to enable its circulation as public transport, it will be traveling through the streets of the city as part of the service of the university linewhich connects the different faculties of the National University of La Plata.
“The global market increasingly demands more conditions from us to be able to compete, many of them linked to caring for the environment. We work with a view to the future, strategically, with that perspective,” explained the Minister of Science, Technology and Research (Mincyt). Daniel Filmus during the start-up act that in La Plata they described as a “historic milestone”. And he added: “With the UNLP we share many projects that are an example in terms of knowledge transfer at the service of improving the quality of life of the people.”
Through the National Agency for the Promotion of Research, Technological Development, the Mincyt financed a large part of the project through a non-reimbursable Contribution Associative “Electric Mobility”. The financing allowed the engineering students of the faculty to remove 0 kilometers from the vehicle that the company from La Plata provided the combustion propulsion system, the engine, the fuel tank and the cooling systems to make room and place the ion battery -lithium, which was imported from China. The Nueve de Julio technicians carried out the terminations.
Alejandro Epifanio, an Electronic Engineering student, highlighted that during the tests carried out with the electric bus in operation, the contrast with a combustion micro in relation to noise was very notable: “We noticed that nobody raised their voices to speak,” he assured. According to the measurements carried out on the noise level in the electric car, 66 decibels on average, which is considered ambient noisewhile in a combustion car it reaches 87 decibels, which is harmful to humans.
Another advantage has to do with the absence of vibrations in electric micros. “Human beings have a maximum limit of daily vibrations that they can withstand and a bus driver exceeds the limits. It absorbs many vibrations with its own body from the engine. On the other hand, in an electric car these vibrations do not exist because it has only one moving part, the rotor, and it does not vibrate. So for the driver and for the occupants it is a much more pleasant and much less harmful trip”, expressed the Electromechanical Engineering student Javier Eguren.
Add value
“Homeland yes, colony no” was one of the slogans left by the crowd that filled a rainy Plaza de Mayo during the last speech of Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. They responded to her that, accompanied by political figures from her area and her allies, human rights activists and her family, she laid the foundations for the future government program. One of them: how to manage strategic resources, such as Vaca Muerta gas and northern lithium, without losing sovereignty and adding value. “We must have a strategic view so that they come to exploit it,” the vice president thus prioritized a fundamental debate in the face of this year’s national elections.
In practice, there are three important experiences that drive added value from the public sector. On the one hand, the formal proposal of the Lithium Table, a space made up of the three provinces that own the salt flats where the mineral is found (Jujuy, Salta and Catamarca) and representatives of the national government. They will present in June a bill to promote industrialization of the mineral through the instrumentation of quotas to allocate a percentage of between 5 and 20 percent of the extracted lithium carbonate for industrialization projects within the national territory.
It is worth noting that, in its original wording, the bill had articles that proposed raising the 3 percent ceiling on the royalties charged by the provinces for the exploitation of their lithium resources on provincial soil. Although the definitive text is not yet available, participants of the roundtable assure that the debate over the collection might be left behind in this election year.
On the other hand, there is the lithium cell and battery development plant UniLiB promoted by the strategic alliance between the UNLP, YPF-Tecnologia (Y-TEC) and the Conicet. This is the first plant in the region that will be able to produce lithium-ion batteries intended to supply energy to homes, as well as larger vehicles such as buses.
After two years of development, the plant located in La Plata plans to start the production of domestic cells in August or September of this year. In one year, they plan to reach the total installed capacity of the plant of 15 Mwh/year, “enough to store energy for 2,000 homes or 300 electric cars per year,” he enthused in dialogue with PageI1 the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Y-TEC and YPF Litio Robert Salvarezza.
“Our batteries are versatile but they can be used to store wind and solar energy for stationary use by the population that is outside the electrical system and today uses a diesel generator. They might replace this fuel that generates carbon dioxide with a solar park with batteries lithium ion. There is a possibility of locating batteries in this niche and obviously also in the case of supplying batteries for the Armed Forces, mobile radars or other applications. It is also possible to think of electric vehicles as urban buses. They sent us the interest companies that produce city cars, for example”.
The total investment for the start-up was 5 million dollars, of which 2 million correspond to the civil works, machinery and production of materials provided by the University, 1.5 million to the laboratories and the pilot plant timely acquired by Y-TEC, and 1.5 million from the Ministry of Science and Technology of the Nation.
“The technology was transferred to a plant that will have a capacity five times greater than the government of the province of Santiago del Estero is installing in association with the National University of that province and of which we are partners,” continues Salvarezza. The equipment required for this plant will demand 10 million dollars. It is in the purchase process and they hope it can start operating in 2024. “The interest of the provincial government is to allocate it for electromobility, that is, to manufacture motorcycles, electric cars and buses,” explains the former Minister of Science and Technology.
Finally, it is found in Palpalá, Jujuy, the Lithium Institute, main mineral research center. Its director, Victoria Flexer, Ph.D. in Chemical Sciences, who had spent twelve years researching the development of batteries made of other materials in Belgium, and decided to repatriate directly to San Salvador de Jujuy in 2015. He arrived at an empty building and began to recruit researchers from all over the country: “In 2015 the national government didn’t even look at us. We had the enormous support of the University of Jujuy and, drill in hand, the researchers were able to install the equipment we were achieving thanks to different financing”, he told PageI1 during a visit to the center.
The Institute carries out different tests related to researching and developing alternative lithium extraction methods that give greater efficiency in time and use of materials from one of the most valued minerals worldwide, while being environmentally sustainable.
1686037993
#Historical #milestone #electric #bus #country #circulates #Plata #time #key #debate #exploitation #resource #country
