The inductive charging of electric vehicles while driving is set to be trialled on the A6 motorway towards Nuremberg in Germany, just a few minutes from the Oberpfälzer Alb Nord service station. This announcement was made by Friedrich-Alexander University (FAU) in Nuremberg, whose Chair of Manufacturing Automation and Production Systems (FAPS) is leading the »Empower« project. On Friday afternoon, Bavarian Minister of State for Science and the Arts Markus Blume and Bavarian Minister of State for the Interior, Sport and Integration Joachim Herrmann gave the starting signal for the several hundred metres long test track.
The first test drives with specially equipped vehicles on the newly inaugurated test track between the Sulzbach-Rosenberg and Amberg-West junctions in the direction of Nuremberg are planned for the second half of the year. »We are interested in the efficiency of the system and how induction coils can be manufactured and installed in the road efficiently and automatically,« explains Florian Risch, Professor of Assembly Technologies for Electrical Energy Storage at FAPS.
The necessary coils are currently being integrated into the road surface. Subsequent technical tests will ensure that the coil configuration has been installed correctly.
The technology is designed to interact exclusively with specially equipped vehicles. For all other vehicles, the route remains passive. Even in equipped vehicles, appropriate shielding ensures that international safety standards for magnetic fields are met.
The test track for inductive charging on the A6 is the first of its kind on a motorway in Germany, but not the first test track of its kind in the country. In 2022, Electreon Wireless Ltd., an Israeli inductive charging specialist involved in the Empower project, built an inductive electric bus charging solution for the Garden Show in Balingen on behalf of EnBW. The shuttle bus route at the Garden Show ran from the car park at the exhibition grounds to the Stadthalle stop. The dynamic charging process took place over a 400-metre section in the city centre.
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