Chennai start-up makes gas turbine-battery combo for trucks
Paves the way for plying heavy-duty vehicles powered by electricity
Batteries onboard electric trucks have to be bulky (5-7 tonnes!) because they need to carry enough power to drive the vehicle over long distances. Their size and weight affect the economics of the operations.
It’d be a lot better if we could produce electricity onboard the vehicle rather than carry it in a battery. This is what a fuel cell does. But fuel cells are, at least till the foreseeable future, extremely expensive.
A Chennai-based, IIT-Madras-incubated start-up, Aerostrovilos, has come up with a novel solution for this: Mount a micro gas turbine on the vehicle to produce electricity. After all, gas turbines have been used for decades for electricity generation — why not use them to drive trucks?