hankyoreh

developed by KAIST

Starting this June, Sejong City will begin operating electric buses with inductive charging, which means that they can recharge their batteries while moving or stationary.

On Mar. 10, the Multifunctional Administrative City Construction Agency (MACCA) announced that it had recently reached an agreement with Sejong Transportation and an electric bus company called Olev to operate wirelessly charging electric buses, which are also called Olev (on-line electric vehicles).

Olev, which was developed at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST), received automobile certification in June 2013.

The charging and operation system of the Olev bus.

As part of plans to run Olev, MACCA will be building charging facilities at two neighborhoods in Sejong and supplying Sejong Transportation with buses that have a 48-passenger capacity.

Olev, which rely on a technology called “shaped magnetic field in resonance” (SMFIR), are able to operate on electricity that is supplied through the interaction of sensors inside the bus and electric lines installed in the road without any separate connecting wires. Currently, Olev are being used on the campus of KAIST university and in the city of Kumi in North Gyeongsang Province.

It takes 30 minutes for Olev buses to be fully charged, and they can travel for about 40 km on the battery without charging. While the buses have a maximum speed of 85 kilometers per hour, they will travel around 60 kilometers per hour inside the city.

Unlike standard vehicles, which use gasoline or diesel as their fuel, Olev buses do not have an internal combustion engine. This has a number of advantages: they do not have any exhaust fumes, make little noise, and hardly vibrate at all.

“We hope that operating these wirelessly charging electric buses will be a chance to improve our public transportation service and to turn Sejong into an eco-friendly green city based on public transportation,” said MACCA.

The charging and operation system of the Olev bus.

By Jeon Jin-shik, South Chungcheong correspondent

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