The goal of this paper is to present the testing procedure of an electric bicycle for the purpose of selecting the most suitable drive for a hotel resort chain e-bike fleet. The testing procedure comprises of installing e-bike conversion kits on a single standard mountain bike type bicycle and testing each separate drive on the same route with the same driving profile. Three different drives are needed, front, mid and rear section drives. Different drives were assessed based on their power, torque, traction, range, acceleration, road incline capability and most importantly the overall tester’s feel of the drive. The kit selection process was based on purchasing drives with the same voltage and power rating, the only difference being the gear ratio of each drive type. The drive kits come with LCD screens, throttle, pedal assist sensors, breaking handles with position signals, motors with spokes, rims and their accompanied drives and most importantly their battery packs. The battery packs have a rated voltage of 48 V, the capacity of 16 Ah and the energy of 768 Wh. It is made using LG’s 18650 type battery cells with 3,7V and 3,2 Ah per cell, this makes a configuration of 13s5p. All three drives were installed on the same bicycle to equalise the mass of the bicycle on every test. For the most accurate measurement the tests need to be conducted on a safe and secure route without any traffic, thus a velodrome was chosen for this purpose. The measuring equipment consists of high frequency GPS and accelerometer modules along with a smartphone application to calculate the vehicle dynamics model and were processed in a LabView environment. The vehicle dynamics model was calculated and plotted in the Matlab simulation environment.

electric bicycle; E-bike; Battery; HUB drive; Middle section drive; GPS; MatLab; LabVIEW; conversion kit;