Seite - 33 - in Hybrid Electric Vehicles

Chapter 2 Development of Bus Drive Technology towards Zero Emissions: A Review Julius Partridge, Wei Wu and Richard Bucknall Additional information is available at the end of the chapter http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/68139 Abstract This chapter aims to provide a comprehensive review of the latest low emission propul- sion vehicles, particularly for bus applications. The challenges for city bus applications and the necessity for low emission technologies for public transportation are addressed. The review will be focusing on the London bus environment, which represents one of the busiest bus networks in the world. The low emission bus applications will be analysed from three main areas: hybrid electric buses, battery electric buses and fuel cell buses. This summarises the main technologies utilised for low emissions urban transportation applications. A comprehensive review of these low emission technologies provides the reader with a general background of the developments in the bus industry and the tech- nologies utilised to improve the performance in terms of both efficiency and emission reduction. This will conclude with a summary of the advantages and disadvantages of the three main technologies and explore the potential opportunity of each. Keywords: low emission drive, battery bus, hybrid electric bus, fuel cell bus, vehicle performances 1. Introduction Over the past 100 years, the bus industry has come to be dominated by diesel powered buses due to their increasingly low cost and greater maturity of the technology. However, this comes at an environmental cost, for example, over 600 kt of CO2 was emitted by London’s bus fleet in 2015 [1]. It is these carbon emissions and their link to climate change that have provided one of the major drivers in recent years to develop and deploy alternative technologies for bus propulsion [2]. Other emissions associated with diesel vehicles such as NOx and particulates © 2017 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.