ABSTRACT
During the last decade, electric vehicles had a remarkable diffusion caused by Li-ion batteries lowered prices and improved performances. Meanwhile, incidents involving fire were reported for electric vehicles during charge operation or simple parking. The potential drawbacks of this technology could play a role on safety in the next years, especially for household or underground charge. This paper presents the development of a novel system concept based on a Vanadium-air flow battery, applied to provide charge and fire safety of electric vehicles through oxygen reduction in a sealed box. When the vehicle is parked inside the box and the passengers are outside of it, a nitrogen injection is operated to reduce the fire risk quickly, during the subsequent vehicle charge operation the oxygen is consumed from the box atmosphere by the cathode of the Vanadium-air battery that supplies energy, then the nitrogen reserve is restored consuming oxygen from the external ambient and the energy output can be supplied to smart grids. The system is mainly composed by the Vanadium-air flow battery, the protection box and the nitrogen reserve, it is sized relatively to the most diffused road and commercial electric vehicles for different values of on-board battery capacity and charge power Moreover, it can be integrated into vehicle-to-grid energy systems improving intersectoral flexibility.
ABSTRACT
The annual production of driftwood in Italy has been estimated to be more than 60,000 tonnes. This wood can be used as an energy source. Particular attention should be paid to its content of alkali and alkaline earth metals, sulfur and chlorine. Few works are available in the literature on this topic. For this reason, the authors propose experimental tests of combustion, gasification and pyrolysis, to evaluate the fate of alkali and alkaline earth metals, sulfur and chlorine in the solid residues and compare the three thermal degradation technologies. The results show a release of alkaline earth metals of about 45% of the initial quantity for gasification and a release of 55% of the initial quantity for combustion (while pyrolysis at 600°C has a very low release). The release of sodium is about 65% for gasification and 80% for combustion. It can be seen that the release of sodium is higher than that of alkaline earth metals; this is due to the divalency of the last ones. Dealing with the release of major elements (chlorine, sulfur and AAEMs) the tests have shown that pyrolysis process is a low emitting technology.