3-5 February 2014 │Athens, Greece

The FABRIC IP officially launched its activities with the organisation of the consortium kick-off meeting that was held in Athens, Greece from 3 to 5 February 2014 and was hosted by the project coordinator, the Institute of Communication and Computer Systems.

During various workshops and through different presentations approximately 53 FABRIC members exchanged views about the project’s concept and objectives, its organisational structure and the related technologies. Moreover, all aspects regarding administrative issues, financial issues and work planning broken down in the different subprojects were thoroughly examined and discussed in order to start the work from a solid basis.

Athens, Greece│9 May 2014

The European Commission, in cooperation with the Greek EU Presidency hosted the European Road Safety Day in Athens, on 9 May 2014. This one-day conference, focused on the headline theme ‘Safe and smart infrastructure’, brought together road safety experts, stakeholders and decision-makers and gave them the opportunity to share their knowledge and discuss ways to continue improving European road safety.

Bordeaux, France ║Thursday, 8 October 2015 (09:00 - 10:30)

FABRIC consortium organised a special session entitled: PR09 -“FEV: The range challenge - Is Wireless Charging the solution?” in the framework of the 22^nd ITS World Congress in Bordeaux, on 8 October 2015.
During this session a number of key experts had the chance to discusse the latest advances on wireless EV charging as well as the issues that delays the wide market deployment. The session will be moderated by the project coordinator, Dr. Angelos Amditis, Research Director of ICCS.

Sepcifically speeches were performed by the following well-known key experts:

• Liam Breslin, Head of Unit-Surface Transport, European Commission
• Luisa Andreone, Centro Ricerche Fiat, Italy
• Grzegorz Ombach, Qualcomm, United States
• Denis Naberezhnykh, TRL, United Kingdom
• Francois Colet, Renault, France

The respective presentations can be found here.

26 September 2014 │Brussels, Belgium

The FABRIC project had been presented by Giannis Karaseitanidis (ICCS) during the EUCAR Sustainable Propulsion Program Board Annual meeting that took place on Friday, 26 September at the EUCAR premises in Brussels.

During this meeting a number of presentations were given on the EUCAR SP Expert Groups domains while key R&D initiatives that are related to the EUCAR Sustainable Propulsion Program Board had the chance to present their approach and evolutions towards a wide deployment of Electromobility. In addition the participants had the chance to interact with European Commission to discuss opportunities for Sustainable Propulsion R&I in Horizon 2020.

 The FABRIC project presentation is available for download here.

10 September 2014 │Detroit, US

A FABRIC IP special interested session (SIS 57) entitled: “Telematics services and dynamic on-road charging solutions for the wide market integration of Future Electric Vehicles ” organised in the framework of the 21^st ITS World Congress in Detroit, US, on September 10, 2014.

During the session attendees had the opportunity to learn more about the latest developments in electromobility and especially regarding the different charging solutions such as ‘on-road charging’ or ITS providing dynamic and real time information on vehicle range and on charging possibility, which allows practically all of the drawbacks of on-board battery packs to be circumvented .

2-5 December, 2014 │Brussels, Belgium

FABRIC project have been succesfully presented by the project Coordinator, Dr. Angelos Amditis, during the 3^rd EEVC organised in Brussels on  2-5 December, 2014. The European Electric Vehicle Congress aimed to foster exchange of views between the different stakeholders and to promote synergies in the field of Electromobility. The EEVC programme included 250 presentations in total from different experts in the field.

On the 4^rth of December Dr. Amditis introduced the FABRIC technical activities and expected impact during a session focusing on Infrastructure & V2G vehicles to the attendees. In adition, a FABRIC poster have been presented during the EU Project Day on the 2^nd of December. 

The presented FABRIC material can be also found here. 

Florence, Italy│18 December 2014

IEEE-IEVC 2014

A workshop entitled: “Wireless Charging: Related Standards and needs” was successfully organised by the FABRIC consortium on December 18, 2014, 11:00 a.m. -1:30 p.m., in Florence, Italy. The workshop took place in the framework of the IEEE-International Electric Vehicle Conference 2014. 

The goal of this workshop was to bring together leading experts from industry, policy makers, automotive manufacturers and relevant standardization bodies to discuss the latest developments in the field of inductive charging for electric vehicles focusing on standardization issues. The workshop aimed not only to review the current status of any relevant standardisation effort but to highlight the steps needed for any related action.

Florence, Italy│17-19 December 2014

IEEE- IEVC 2014

With basic aim to strength networking and knowledge exchange between relevant to Electromobility European and National R&D initiatives as well as to promote the diffusion of their main messages and results to a wide audience, FABRIC organised the following activities during the  IEEE-International Electric Vehicle Conference 2014:

•  "Europe meets IEVC" Workshop on December 19, 2014 

The basic scope of this Workshop was to create a forum where key stakeholders will have the opportunity to present state of the art developments in EC funded and national projects towards a wide deployment of electromobility in Europe identify trends and roadblocks and possibly draft a roadmap towards the large scale implementation of electromobility. During the workshop, the following projects have been presented: FABRIC, UNPLUGGED, ZeEus, ASTERICS, eCo-FEV, Green eMotion, EV CONNECT, FastInCharge, STEEP, Ele.C.Tra and DOROTHY.
More information regarding this activity please find  a report including all discussed topics is available here, while all performed presentation may be found here. 

3-5 March 2015 │Aachen, Germany

A FABRIC paper entitled: “FABRIC approach to FEV wireless dynamic charging and foreseen energy storage system requirements for grid impact reduction” has been presented by T. Theodoropoulos of ICCS during an IEEE Special Session focusing on Charging Technologies and Energy Storage Systems for Electric and Plug-in Hybrid Vehicles(SS4), organised in the framework of ESARS2015 at RWTH University Campus,  Aachen - Germany, on 3-5 March 2015. 
During this session, participants discussed issues related to storage sizing for dunamic wireless charging, fast charging strategies, battery technology for heavy vehicles and energy storage systems for urban means of transport.

FABRIC presentation is available  here  for donwload. 

26 March 2015 │Zaragoza, Spain

Unplugged project final event took place at Zaragoza, Spain on the 26^th of March 2015 where the results of the project were presented to invited experts in the field of electromobility. There was a live demonstration of static wireless charging of a light duty vehicle and a demonstration using a passenger vehicle of the RFID and camera-based system developed in Unplugged for the optimum alignment of the primary and secondary coils prior to EV charging. In a parallel session, EU projects that mainly focus on the dynamic EV charging and could be considered continuations of Unplugged project were presented. During this parallel session  the concept and the main first year technical developments of FABRIC project were presented by the project manager Dr. Yannis Damousis. The presentation is available for download here.

A FABRIC paper has been presented by T.Theodoropoulos ICCS during the First International Workshop on Integrating Communications, Control, Computing Technologies for Smart Grid (ICT4SG) that will be held in the framework of 2015 IEEE 81st Vehicular Technology Conference on 11–14 May 2015, in Glasgow, Scotland.

The Project FABRIC has been a major subject of the ICCEP 2015 congress, with the presentation related to the paper “Optimizing Grid to Vehicle electric energy system with new technologies”, performed by Giampiero Brusaglino from ATA during the Session “Smart Grids” that was held on Wednesday, 17th June, in Taormina, Italy.
The paper is focused on the evolution of the technology concept of magnetic flux application in the contactless energy transfer with the use of resonant circuits which has brought to new technical solutions, that offer a flexible and user friendly vehicle – infrastructure interface for the various modes of operation of the electric vehicles, static and dynamic. The wireless dynamic power transfer can offer the means to reduce significantly the on-board energy storage system requirements. Trade off opportunities can be considered between various elements from vehicle and infrastructure size, technical and economical and for the grid side management as well. Grid to vehicle interaction is a multi-aspect matter addressed by FABRIC. Please find the respective presentation here.

In addition, a FABRIC roll-up banner has been exhibited to the attendees during the breaks at the entrance of the presentation rooms, while the project evolutions and technical advances have been further discussed with numerous participants, with very positive appreciation.

Brussels, Belgium│2 February 2016
The FABRIC One-Day Conference, which focused on the challenges and concepts of the Wireless dynamic charging for FEVs, was successfully held in Brussels, on the 2^nd of February 2016.  The Conference was organized by ICCS and hosted by ERTICO-ITS Europe and gathered approximately 70 participants from 15 different countries, including policy makers, standardization experts, OEMs, solution providers as well as representatives of the academic and research community.

The conference was inaugurated by Mr. Hermann Meyer, CEO of ERTICO-ITS Europe, who welcomed the participants and introduced ERTICO activities, emphasizing in the Electromobility area and specifically on the FABRIC activities towards its large-scale deployment. Following that, Mr. Angelos Amditis, Research Director of ICCS and FABRIC project Coordinator, presented the motives for wireless dynamic charging for EVs, their important advantages compares to other EV charging technologies and introduced the objectives and goals of the Conference. In addition, Mr. Maurizio Maggiore, the Project Officer of FABRIC, presented the strategic questions that arise regarding the large-scale deployment of Electromobility and he emphasized on the need to figure out the directions regarding Electromobility and pay close attention to the user needs. He also stated that interoperability is of great importance and highlighted the need to assess the strengths and weaknesses of all charging technologies before taking important deployment decisions.The opening session ended with the speech of Mr. Alessandro Coda, Research Director of EUCAR, who introduced EUCAR, its mission and the three Strategic Pillars for collaborative research and innovation (R&I) in the automotive sector to the attendees. In addition, he also presented the projects where EUCAR is involved and officially supports in the framework of the Strategic Pillar of Sustainable Propulsion.

During the 1^st technical session, the FABRIC project activities as well as some initial results were presented to the attendees. Specifically, Mr. Angelos Amditis (ICCS) gave an overview of the project’s status and developments during the first two years of its duration while Mr. Peter Vermaat (TRL) presented the charging solutions and prototypes which are under development in the project. After that the activities in the Italian and French tests sites were presented by Mr. Paolo Guglielmi (POLITO) and Mr. Stephane Laporte (VEDECOM) respectively. The framework, methodology and preliminary results for the feasibility analysis of wireless dynamic charging within FABRIC was also discussed by Mr. Sebastian Meijer (KTH). Finally, the ICT requirements, functionalities and existing gaps for dynamic charging as identified within FABRIC were presented by Mr. Andrew Winder (ERTICO).
The next session, gathered key experts from several standardization bodies, associations and related platforms with basic aim to discuss the potential of wireless dynamic charging in the scope of standardization and policy drawing and implementation. Particularly, the eMI³ platform activities for Electromobility were presented by Andrew Winder (ERTICO) and the current status of static and dynamic wireless EV charging was presented by Mr. Nicholas Keeling (Qualcomm). After that, Mr. Gian Maurizio Rodella (CUNA) introduced the future plans of international standardization bodies for Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) and gave a short presentation of CUNA, the national representative of Italy to ISO and CEN and Mr. Peter Van den Bossche (Vrije Universiteit Brussels) talked about the IEC standardization for WPT.

The conference continued with a Round Table Discussion that focused on the following issues/questions:  

• Trends and roadblocks towards the wide deployment of Electromobility;
•  How far are we from the deployment of dynamic charging? What are the obstacles?
• Which charging technology is the more likely candidate for deployment?

The discussion panel, that consisted by well-known experts from ALSTOM, Viktoria Swedish, Hubject, CRF and KAIST, identified interoperability of the developed systems and standardization as issues of high importance for the wide deployment of Electromobility. Regarding the obstacles for the wireless charging deployment it was commonly agreed that the cost, mainly for building the required infrastructure, is the biggest one. Other roadblocks that were pointed out are related to V2G connection, safety and EM interference, the current regulatory framework (or the lack of it) and standardization as well as the lack of business models. Regarding which technology is the more likely candidate for deployment it was mentioned that this issue highly depends on politics and needs for standardization.

The FABRIC project, ccordinator was invited to perform a speech during this year EUCAR Programme Board Meeting for Sustainable Propulsion, which was held on the 6th September of 2016. During this important meeting other Sustainable propulsion projects supported by EUCAR were presented by their coordinators (namely ECOCHAMPS, FABRIC, GASON,PHOTOFUELS and REWARD projects) among others, while discussions took place with EUCAR Council Members, Expert Group Leaders and Deputy Leaders as well as with European Commission officials on Sustainable Propulsion in Horizon 2020 and EUCAR key challenges and future R&I needs. 

For more information about the latest  FABRIC developements and advances presented by Dr. Agnelos Amditis in this meetind, the project presentation is available here for download (pdf).

Formula SAE Italy & Formula Electric Italy is a student design competition organized by the FABRIC project partner ATA. The first competition took place in 2005.
The concept behind the event is that a fictional manufacturing company has contracted a design team to develop a small Formula-style race car. The prototype race car is to be evaluated for its potential as a production item. The target marketing group for the race car is the non-professional weekend autocross racer. Each student team designs, builds and tests a prototype based on a series of rules whose purpose is both to ensure onsite event operations and promote clever problem solving.

In the July 2016 event, that was held in Varano de’ Melegari (Parma),85 teams from 25 nations were participated, of which 30 had to do with electric vehicles.All in all the Formula SAE Italy & Formula Electric Italy was attended by 120 Automotive and Motorsport Experts while the competing teams consisted of more than 2000 engineering students in total. To stimulate the interest of the teams to a new energy efficient and user friendly system, addressing the integration of vehicle to external energy system interfaces which is considered important for the development of Electromobility, ATA partners introduce the FABRIC project work and activities on Magnetic Field Wireless Power Transfer to the competitors. The FABRIC presentation can be found here as (pdf).

A FABRIC related special session was organized in the framework of the 23^rd ITS World Congress in Melbourne, on Friday 14 October 2016 (13:00-14:30). The session entiled: SIS 70 "Advances on innovative EV Charging Technologies" gathered key experts from Europe and abroad who discussed the latest technological advances in Electromobility, as well as EV-focused V2X ICT and standardization SoA and gaps that delay wide market deployment. The session was organised by the project Coordinator, Dr. Angelos Amditis and was moderated by Jean-Charles Pandazis from ERTICO-ITS Europe.

Two papers related to FABRIC activities were presented by UNIGE-DITEN partners during the 2016 ApplePies International Conference that was held in Rome, Italy, on 15-16 September 2016. ApplePies is an annual conference that offers a venue for presenting leading-edge research on electronic engineering applications and for discussing on the trends, challenges and opportunities in the field. The overall goal of this event is to stimulate a proficuous collaboration between academy and industry on the world of the applications of the electronic technologies.

The first FABRIC paper entitled: “Maximizing Power Transfer for Dynamic Wireless Charging Electric Vehicles” describes a system under development for optimizing the power transfer for dynamic charging vehicles. The system relies on a coil coupling sensor and a camera. The second  entitled: “Developing ICT Solutions for Dynamic Charging of Electric Vehicles” presents some ICT systems developed within FABRIC.

Both paper presentations, which are available as pdf files here, were attended by approximately 50 experts coming from the related industry and scientific community.

A FABRIC paper entitled: "Smart Grid Architectures for Dynamic Wireless EV Charging" was presented by Dr. Giannis Karaseitanidis from ICCS at the MedPower2016 Conference. This year event was organised in Belgrade, Serbia, from 6 to 9 November 2016 with main focus on topics of interest of the Electric Power Industry.
The FABRIC paper, which will be available at the IET, IEEE and INSPECT digital libraries shortly as a part fo the conference proceedings, presents the strategies developed within FABRIC to address issues related to range, energy consuption costs etc. with intelligent energy management. The presentation (available here as a pdf) was performed by Dr. Karaseitanidis on Wednesday, 9 November 2016 during the session S15.1 "E-mobility, smart grids, smart buildings and smart cities" (11:00-12:30 local time). Half of the session was devoted to issues related to EV connectivity to the grid while the other half was related to issues related to a smart grid in the context of a smart city. The audience of the specific session was in the range of 20-30 people, including mostly academics.

The FABRIC project activities were presented by Dr. Villy Portouli from ICCS at a poster session that was held in the framework of the Electrical Systems for Aircraft, Railway, Ship propulsion and Road Vehicles & International Transportation Electrification Conference organised in Toulouse, France, on November 2-4, 2016

The FABRIC poster that is available here as a pfd file, is describing the researcher and advances presented at a paper entitled: "Analysis of AIMD-based DSM for EV wireless charging on the move" . This paper is focusing on Demand Side Management (DSM) ICT software architecture and evaluation of the overall methodology under a simulated dynamic wireless charging environment at regular highway speeds.

The IA-HEV TASK 26 Workshop was an IEA (International Energy Agency) workshop on wireless power transfer for EVs that was held on June 28-29, 2016 in Rotterdam, Netherlands. The workshop, which was focused on discussing Wireless Power Transfer Interoperability and Standards, was hosted by PROOV and the IEA’s Implementing Agreement on Hybrid Electric Vehicles (IA-HEV).

The FABRIC project was represented by Mr. Giampiero Brusaglino, from ATA-Associazione Tecnica dell’Automobile, who gave the presentation on “Wireless Power Transfer for Electric Vehicles; Interoperability and Standards the critical factors toward mass adoption”.

During his speech that took place in the second day of the Workshop in the framework of Meeting 4: "Interoperability & Standards", Mr. Brusaglino presented the Electromobility trends and needs while taken into consideration the system Electric vehicle-User-Infrastructure. For this Integrated system the wireless power transfer can play a key role, providing, a way for an effective energy flow grid to vehicle, through the different modes of power transfer, static, stationary and dynamic. The needs are the interoperability of the systems and an harmonized standard frame to govern the system development and its operation through a user friendly communication by ICT. An Hyper-Network linking Vehicles, Charging, Energy supply infrastructure and Business integration, operated by service providers, could be the way to build an interoperability platform. The presentation can be found here.

The event was attended by over 30 participants, from various Entities, European and oversee, involved in the field of wireless power transfer technology and Information and communication technology and relevant applications.

FABRIC’s 7th Plenary meeting was held in Torino, Italy, on 1 & 2 December 2016. During the meeting, the consortium discussed the latest achievements across all WP’s of the project.
Moreover, a visit to the Italian test site was made where ongoing technical advancements were  presented. In parallel a workshop focusing on the integration of load balancing in the charging ecosystem, took place within POLITO labs.

A project demonstration was held in conjunction with Task 26 wireless charging Standardization Working Group during 24-26/4/17 in Satory, France. The event aimed at the demonstration of the FABRIC French test site to several key stakeholders and the partners.

During the first day of the demonstrations, after initial introductory speeches by the Project Coordinator and the Project Officer, VEDECOM presented the system development and functionality and then a demo of the system took place, where the vehicles and components were showcased.

On the morning of the second day, a very successful demonstration of the VEDECOM site system took place, attended by the Project officer, external experts, and project members.

The demonstration included, among others, charging at various speeds, charging of two vehicles at the same time and extreme misalignment to show the automatic disengagement of the charging system when misalignment becomes greater than 20cm.

An one-day project meeting was also held on the 24th, focusing on the work conducted so far within Sub-projects 4 “integration, infrastructure & testing” and 5 “system perspective of feasibility and impact of other non technical aspects”.

On the 28^th of March 2017 the inauguration of VEDECOM’s e-road took place. The inauguration was accompanied by several demonstrations of dynamic wireless charging of the electric Vehicle used for the testing of the developed technologies, a Renault Kangoo.

June 19, 2017 ǁ Strasbourg


Please find the Workshop agenda here (pdf). 

FABRIC project activities were successfully presented by Guy Frémont from Sanef, during a Pavement management workshop, that was organised by Albertis, on May 22-24, 2017 at the company’s headquarters, in Barcelona, Spain. The workshop was attended by 54 experts working mostly at the road engineering, construction and maintenance sectors and coming from both from Europe (i.e. France, Italy and Spain) and abroad (i.e. Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Puerto Rico). Mr.  Frémont’s speech focused on the activities of the FABRIC project towards the deployment of Dynamic electric charging on motorways. The participants showed high interest on the subject of the presentation as they were not familiar with the electric charging system and technologies. During the discussion that followed, participants’ questions concerned mostly the cost for the construction of the electric charging system and who is expected to cover these costs, the performance of the energy transfer, etc.

The presentation is available here as a pdf.

A related to FABRIC presentation was performed by Joram Langbroek from KTH during the 1^st Electric Road Systems Conference that took place in Sandviken (SE), on 14-15 June 2017. During his speech Mr. Langbroek presented the basic facts and outcomes of the joint KTH and TNO study which focuses on the traffic operational effects of large-scale development of electric roads. The study was conducted in the framework of the FABRIC project and specifically as part of the activities within Sub-project 5: Assessment.

The main objectives of this study were to investigate the:

1.       physical operations of road way systems:

          a.       Under a staged deployment of on-road charging infrastructure;

          b.      And partial market penetration of compatibly-equipped vehicles into the general fleet;

2.       traffic operational as well as emission effects.

The presentation is available here as pdf.

An ICCS paper focusing on FABRIC Dynamic wireless EV charging system design for efficient e-mobility was presented during a poster session at the 30^th Electric Vehicle Symposium & Exhibition that took place in Stuttgart, on October 9-11, 2017. The paper concludes that DWC has the potential of easing introduction of EVs to the market by supporting increase in EV range and driver comfort. Feasibility analysis performed within the FABRIC project, highlights the importance of a systematic approach to the associated charging while driving operations. Power electronic integration to demand side management optimisation is an example of system wide integration enabling added value services to both EV end users and the power grid. Similar findings in other domains such as billing, booking, payment and driver assistance systems have been identified and will be further presented and analyzed. Complementing dynamic wireless charging systems with services that target cost efficiency is essential in addressing increased charging infrastructure deployment costs.

Related information are also available at the respective poster (pdf).

The first results of the FABRIC project have been presented by Juan de Blas from Qi Europe at the IV European Electric Vehicle Congress, that took place in Madrid on 27 October 2017 during a session dedicated to European EV projects. During his presentation Mr. de Blas had the chance to give an overview of the already completed FABRIC charging prototypes, the testing that is taking place within the project in three different test site (France, Italy and Sweden) as well as the initial findings of the currently conducting feasibility analysis. FABRIC testing activities are expected to be concluded by 2017 and feasibility studies based on the test results will be finalised until the end of the project duration. These studies will reveal whether dynamic charging can be deployed in a large scale and what investments are necessary to do so. 

The presentation is available here: http://www.fabric-project.euimages/Presentations/FABRIC_CEVE_2017-Juan_de_Blas_.pdf