Grant: Engage Plus Grants Program

Recently, e-bikes have been popular because they offer several benefits such as the convenience for riders andno carbon dioxide emission to our environment. However, the high cost and the short duration of battery packseem to be the biggest drawbacks that prevent e-bikes from widely spreading on the market. In order to reducethe cost, Alizeti, our industrial partner, has successfully developed a solution to convert most existing bicyclesinto a full featured e-bikes. In this solution, the powertrain system is basically based on an electric-poweredroller in contact with the tire which drives the bike by friction. The battery and the drive train are built into acompact enclosure to be fixed on a conventional rear luggage rack. Thanks to this simple configuration, theriders can easily convert their bike into a full featured e-bike at low cost. In order to improve the lifetime of thebattery pack, this project will complete the development of an intelligent portable battery charger. The batterypack of Alizeti's e-bike is a 24V/11.6Ah pack made from Li-Ion battery cells. The developed intelligentportable charger will perform with two main advantageous features. Firstly, the impedance of the battery packwill be maintained at its minimum value during the charging process in order to improve significantly thecharging efficiency and the lifetime of the battery. This will result in economy for the riders who will not haveto pay for frequent battery pack replacement and maintenance. The second feature is that the battery pack canbe charged from both AC and DC power sources with a large voltage range, going from 12V to 48V in case ofDC power supply and from 95Vrms to 265Vrms in case of AC power supply. With this feature, the developedcharger can charge the e-bike battery from all popular available power sources. As a result riders will use theire-bikes more effectively and comfortably. In addition, the developed charger has a size and weight similar tothe popular netbook chargers. With these advantageous features, e-bikes can be charged easily with anintelligent manner. Hence, the completion of this project will significantly contribute to widely spread thee-bike on the road by offering users a low-cost but powerful e-bike.