Cenex and the Leeds City Council have jointly launched a project to enhance air quality by offering local authorities the technology needed to control vehicle emissions in the UK city.
Dubbed Project ACCRA, the project will see Cenex, Leeds City Council collaborating with the Transport Systems Catapult, Dynniq, Earthsense and Tevva Motors.
Project ACCRA will highlight Smart City technology applications according to UK’s Centre of Excellence for low carbon technologies, Cenex. These applications will facilitate demonstration of emissions control in real-time, usage of live air quality data to trigger electric hybrid engines to switch to zero-emission running automatically in heavily polluted areas.
Cenex transport head Steve Carroll said: “Local air quality is a persistent and growing problem in urban centres across the UK and globally.
“Using real-time air quality data to automatically instruct vehicles driving into high pollution areas to switch to zero-emissions driving, has the potential to transform urban transportation regulation and save thousands of lives.”
Project ACCRA will be demonstrated in Leeds and is claimed to have the potential to provide cities new methods to cut down on urban air pollution without additional burden on businesses or motorists.
Intelligent mobility experts Transport Systems Catapult will co-ordinate with a group of automotive innovators to capture air quality readings in real-time that will trigger hybrid electric engines to switch to zero-emission running on their own.
Tevva Motors will develop a hybrid vehicle interface to test the technology concept dubbed as active geofencing.
Dynniq, a transportation network systems developer, on the other hand will develop a decision-making engine that will have the capacity of taking inputs from a range of city data including live air quality details and traffic conditions in real time.
EarthSense will monitor and upload updated local air quality levels to the interface. These will be used to trigger on-demand zero-emissions running instructions in the Tevva vehicles that will be participating in the project.
Cenex along with Transport Systems Catapult will assess the application, markets, business models and scalability of the system with a hope of replicating the technology in other areas of Leeds and potential clean air zones in the UK.