Follow on of Range extended- refrigerated BEVs for CO2 abatement in fleets project

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Innovate UK
Innovate UK
Innovate UK
Innovate UK
Innovate UK

£3,016,470

March 11, 2021

March 11, 2023

Sunamp was founded to respond to the need for low to zero-carbon thermal energy storage and management in the automotive and building environments. Sunamp develops, manufactures, and distributes a novel, high-efficiency thermal energy storage and processing technology: the Heat Battery. This is a packaged store of heat energy which internally uses Phase Change Material (PCM) to store multiple times more heat than an equal sized water tank. During a 'phase change', such as a transition from liquid to solid, a lot of heat is stored or released. Sunamp has perfected the mechanical design that makes a Heat Battery long lasting and easy to integrate: modular, scalable and easy to connect into heating systems. Heat Batteries can be integrated with various energy sources e.g. heat pumps and chillers. This delivers extremely efficient systems for recovering waste heat and generating renewable heat/coolth. The concept is now being explored in sectors as diverse as heating/cooling buildings at lower cost, industrial hot and cold processing and automotive design. Sunamp's ultimate goals is deployment of its technology in innovative products that reduce fuel poverty, reduce energy consumption, and reduce carbon intensity of cars, vans, trucks, buses and buildings by harnessing free or low-cost renewable heat.

Nowadays, the number of electric vehicles used in fleets to deliver chilled and frozen goods is low due to: 1) limited daily mileage as compared to internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles; and 2) extreme discrepancies between summer and winter range as the electrical batteries have to provide energy for traction, cabin conditioning, and refrigeration of the container. In this project, Sunamp aims to improve a technology developed in a recently concluded Innovate UK IDP12 project. The improvements will significantly increase the adoption of electric chilled and refrigerated vehicles for short delivery of frozen goods, by integrating compact thermal stores to decouple the energy required for traction (from electric batteries) from that required for thermal loads (from thermal batteries), i.e. cabin heating and chill/refrigeration of the container. Major benefits are: 1) significant reduction of local CO2 emissions and other pollutants by removing thousands of commercial ICE vehicles in cities; 2) increase of night deliveries because of low vehicle noise.