Zero Emission Refrigerated Operations (ZERO)

This project -- Zero Emission Refrigerated Operations (ZERO) - is a collaboration between Sunswap and Cenex to develop a novel and bespoke electrical architecture for a solar & battery powered Transport Refrigeration Unit (TRU). Cenex will compile energy and operational requirements from customers and feed these into the development process which in turn enables Sunswap to develop a novel electrical system for their TRU.

The majority of TRUs rely on secondary diesel engines to provide power for cooling. They are responsible for large amounts of pollution due to the looser regulations enforced on secondary engines. However, pushed by tightening legislation and corporate social responsibility, customers require a clean and economical alternative to diesel TRUs.

Cenex will facilitate a workshop for a Customers Requirements Group (CRG) and feed the results back to the design process. This will allow customer requirements to be included throughout the project to ensure the final product meets the needs of the industry. A key focus of Cenex's work will be collecting responses from end-users about how they are able to facilitate charging of TRUs at a fleet level. Some customers may have limited grid capacity but need fast charging to reduce fleet downtime. Other customers may have long periods of downtime thus removing the need for fast charging.

Additional analysis of the energy usage across a fleet of electric TRUs and a life-cycle analysis to quantify the benefits of shifting to zero-emissions TRUs will also be provided by Cenex. As they are a research organisation, their findings will be disseminated to fleet operators and made available to benefit the public.