Elisava Racing Team’s ‘Onux’ proposes a battery swapping and self-maintenance system for motosharing
The future of urban mobility is already here. The electrification of vehicles, traffic restrictions, the rise of micro-mobility and shared mobility are responsible for the fact that we currently conceive the way we move in a completely different way.
With 2030 as a time horizon, eight students from the Undergraduate Degree in Industrial Design Engineering have developed Onux, a battery swapping system that promotes the self-maintenance of sharing motorcycles.
Onux is the union between the network of users and the management of battery charging, being these responsible for the movement and recharging of each of the vehicles, thus eliminating the impact of the operators who currently perform this task. To this end, a charging station has been designed that works in parallel with a digital system that manages the user network, the swappers.
The charging station consists of two distinct parts, the charging rack and the universal battery:
- The charging rack is modular and stackable, allowing it to be adapted to all kinds of spaces. It also offers a fully interactive experience, where the user will be guided through lights, sounds, movements and screens for the correct extraction and insertion of the batteries. By means of a detachable structure, it is intended to create a renting system, generating a network of charging stations determined by the demand of the users.
- The universal battery is hybrid and is composed of a combination of cells and supercapacitors. This allows it to have a higher performance and, consequently, its useful life is extended. The main characteristic of this battery is its recyclability. With this premise in mind, the cells have been joined without welding and the components have been distributed in such a way as to facilitate assembly and disassembly, making the battery as compact as possible. By means of a bidirectional connector, Onux can take from the grid and transfer excess energy from the system to the grid.
Onux is a comprehensive project that encompasses market research, business opportunity discovery and development, and the design and implementation of each of the project’s physical and digital components. Onux is the result of the fourth edition of the Elisava Racing Team, which has also created Elisava’s first innovation laboratory for electric mobility (ERT-LIME).
Elisava Racing Team: Mar Tarrazona (Team Leader), Sara Mues (Project Manager), Quim Gutiérrez, Ricardo Horno, Guillermo García, Muna Abdul, Sandra Canals and Alex Amat.
Tutored by: Pau Romagosa (Project Leader), Miquel Tejero, Albert Sosa and Marta Janeras (Head of ERT-LIME).
