Bengaluru based startup Greendzine Technologies is decarbonising mobility through its light electric mobility solutions for the warehouse-to-home market. The company has over 30 intellectual properties (IPs) but what catches an innovator’s eye is its infinity charger module for electric vehicles
Aggressive expansion of the e-commerce sector and a sustained rise in demand led by accelerating manufacturing investments have resulted in the growth of new and emerging warehousing technologies to ease material handling and management in warehouses.
Bengaluru based Greendzine Technologies has joined the movement and intends to replace the mundane work of manual movement and material handling within the warehouse with an autonomous solution to get better repeatability, accuracy, and reliability. With more than 30 IPs related to vehicle design, architecture, electric powertrain, charger technology, and battery cooling system to its credit, the company aims to ease warehouse mobility through its smart picking solution MOPTro.
MOPTro eliminates the tedious manual picking process for operators, ensuring accurate picking and put-away. The electric vehicle comes with an application software on a mobile device attached to the MOPTro, which shows the fastest aisle route to picking a product, thus enabling greater throughput.
The electric vehicle is designed to manoeuvre through short narrow aisles. The EV can be controlled for bidirectional movement, which increases the productivity in picking, put-away, and transportation at a warehouse.
Founded in 2015, Greendzine has a range of electric vehicles to support different segments—Quark EV for personal commute, MOPTro EV for warehousing applications, and Irrway EV for fun and leisure mobility in amusement parks and go-kart tracks. Currently, the startup has sold 350 units of the product along with the charger. Overall it has sold around 1,000 vehicles across all sectors.
The company says that its MOPTros can be deployed in a minimum warehouse size of about 4,645 square metres (50,000 square feet) to achieve a 30% increase in productivity. The products are direct plug and play solutions. The company has distributors all over India and also sells directly to its customers.
Despite having different EV designs for each segment, all of the green mobility solutions come with a single charging module that can be used with any other electric vehicle, be it a two-wheeler or a three-wheeler. The charging modules can be connected in series and parallel to trigger the charging mechanism to charge each other.
“In power electronics, you cannot connect two power-generating converters in series, because you would get into load balancing issues. We also faced that problem, but we were able to solve it through multiple iterations, and we ultimately used a special switching mechanism called GaN FET. We were able to switch GaN FET switches at a frequency of 1MHz, increasing the power density of the charger,” explains co-founder Karthikeyan Sundaram.
Sundaram says that the team overcame the challenge to prevent the switch from bursting or catching fire at that frequency. The company has added this technology along with the cooling system for the charger to its list of IPs. While using immersive cooling technology, the power electronics board is immersed in a water-like solution, which is developed in-house. The whole charging module is compact.
Greendzine Technologies team
“Our charger is half the size of the ones available in the market but can deliver the same capacity of power as the ones available in the market. The same charger can be used to charge an electric cycle. Two charging modules can be used to charge a bike. Three can be used to charge autos and cars. More than four or five can be used to charge an electric bus,” Sundaram informs.
Incubated under IIIT Bengaluru Innovation Centre, the startup has received an undisclosed amount of funding from Karnataka IT Venture Capital (KITVEN) Fund. The company designs the components and places an order with its manufacturing partners for the same. Once the components are received, it assembles the parts and tests the EVs at the Bengaluru facility.
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Greendzine is currently looking for powertrain and ECU components vendors and partners to expand its business. The company has managed to veer its way through inflation and supply chain constraints.
Co-founder Anjan Kumar N. says that they overcame these challenges by resizing their order size for production and re-negotiating vendor contracts. The company is currently running pilots to connect all its EV products onto one single software platform. To ensure that the economy yields more productivity per person, they would need to keep automating their lower-value-addition jobs, so that people can keep moving towards higher-value-addition jobs and solutions like MOPTro.
