ITS technologies in the sustainable mobility scenario. A FCHEV case study.

The purpose of the present work is to analyze, through a case study, the possibilities offered by ITS systems in new sustainable scenarios related to zero-emission mobility. This thesis has been carried out in collaboration with CNR IEIIT and CNR ITAE. The work is divided in four sections: “ITS systems”, “Case study”, “Development” and “Test and possible scenarios”. The first part explores the relevance of ITS technologies, that are advanced applications that aims to provide innovative services related to different modes of transport and traffic management, allowing safer, smarter and more efficient use of transport networks, and their use in different fields of application from logistics to automotive. After the introduction, an example of the application of ITS in the city of Turin is presented which shows the correlation of these systems with the issues related to the mitigation of climate change and the achievement of the goal of safer and more efficient transport systems. The point of intersection between ITS and integrated services connected to the mobility, as reported in this first chapter, is represented by MaaS, that is the future concept of mobility in which private and public transportation services are integrated in one service, where the most important role is the final user. Sustainable mobility means green mobility, adopting low or zero emission vehicles, that are presented in this first part as BEV, FCEV and FCHEV, showing the main differences between them and introducing the hydrogen production-related technologies and potentialities for mobility. In chapter 2 there is the presentation of our case study, that is a Fuel Cell Hybrid Electric Vehicle developed by CNR ITAE of Messina. The concept behind this vehicle is to overcome the problems related with strictly electric or hydrogen powered vehicle giving a zero emission “hybrid” solution. In this section there is an overview about the main features of the vehicle, including the operating principle of the fuel cell and energy management strategies related to the state of charge of the batteries. The green production of the hydrogen is crucial to achieve the climate objectives that the world is indicating, in this context the I-Next project takes place in the Capo d’Orlando experimental site that is presented at the end of section 2. The aim of the third section is to show the potentialities offered by the interaction between the vehicle, different devices and a system able to interact with all these subsystems exploiting different type of communication technology, in such a way that all these devices can interact with each other in a non-overlapping way. The adopted microcontroller is an STM32F429ZI, a very versatile and highly configurable system. In this section there is a presentation of the adopted communication protocols, SPI, I2C, USART and CAN and the computational results with the used devices (RTC, OLED, SD Card, BMP180, GPS). The last part of this thesis is focused on the test on the vehicle, analyzing the CAN communication, through which we have access to a number of messages; all these parameters will be helpful in the communication environment from a vehicle to another vehicle or to an infrastructure exploiting these data in real-time to take crucial decisions in future scenarios that are the last topic of this chapter.