Electrically facilitated solar cargo hauler - a key to easy and safe transportation of goods without dependency on the national grid

Abstract

Cargo is a vital mode of transporting goods. In Bangladesh, most of the cargo haulers are manually driven in rural areas. If motorized, the cargos are likely to draw a huge amount of power from the national grid which in turn increases load shedding. Considering the necessity to technologically improve the manually driven cargo hauler and for the development of rural areas, Control & Applications Research Centre (CARC), BRAC University, has projected an easy, eco-friendly and safe way of transporting large amount of goods without being dependent on the national grid. After CARC has provided solution to power dependency for electrically assisted torque sensor based rickshaw-van (human hauler) with PV panel, the cargo hauler has been improved with extra features added to enhance the performance and comfort of the cargo puller. The final designed cargo hauler consists of three 500W hub motors, shock absorber, high performance heavy duty drum brakes and pedicab wheels. An additional carrier attached at the rear further maximizes the load carrying capacity of the vehicle. The paper depicts field test data and qualitative analysis of the cargo hauler and it has been found that cargo hauler gives almost twice maximum and average speed than the human hauler in half of the run time than that of human hauler.