The Future Technology of Cars

Well, I have taken some urging from a few friends and have found a niche to write a little bit on . Since I am a Professional Licensed Electrical Engineer and deal with energy savings at my place of employment, I have become interested in future car technology based on the energy savings from them.

At our company, we have over six hundred motors ranging from fractional horsepower to four thousand horsepower. We spend several miilion dollars on electrical energy alone, not to include the natural gas and coal we use. So energy conservation is important to us. Also, we have to justify energy reduction projects, in which we actually will get the cost reduction from the project.

With the high cost of gasoline over the last few year, the automotive industry has been pumping out higher fuel ecomony cars. They are also getting pressure from the government on greenhouse gas reductions.

The internal combustion engine, as applied to the automobile, is only about twenty five to thirty percent efficient in most cases. The Otto cycle, which is the engineering term for this combustion type engine, at most is only about 50% efficient. As most car engines are over sized, because we like to have fast zero to sixty acceleration, we lose even more efficiency because the engines are not running at the peak efficiency most of the time.

There have been other technology tried and some are being invented to provide better efficiencies. Electric cars have been looked at and even some produced with limited success.

From a time-line found on the internet, one can see that electric cars started hitting the markets by most automotive makers in the mid 1990's. By 2000 the production was halted and the cars were recovered and destroyed, from claims that parts were no longer available to repair the cars.

The electric cars showed some promises, but were hindered by the following road blocks:

• Battery technology limited the travel to less than 100 miles between charge,
• charge times were between 3 hours to 15 hours based on technology,
• Batteries were heavy, addition of more batteries did not increase distances.
• Limited capabilities on the road to find places to re-charge.
• Battery life was relatively short and replacements were expensive.
• Lights, heat, and air conditioning consumed a lot of the battery power and lowered the travel distances to less than fifty miles.

The public interest was limited and pretty much a contastrophy. To own an electric car, for most people, would require another car to be used on further distances - making the overall cost of owning the electric car more than owning just a gas driven car. The electrical car was not as practical as one would at first think. Most of the electric cars were leased by businesses to get tax write-offs for using them.

From the electric car came the development of the hybrid car. The HEV style hybrid car used a gas engine to keep the battery charged, while a synchronous ac motor powered the drive train. With this, the gas engine was set to run at its most efficient point to over thirty five efficiency. This almost doubled the efficiency of most car engine systems. The electrical conversion system are over ninty-five percent efficient so this did not degrade the overall efficiency much. The Toyota Prius is a HEV style hybrid

With the Hybrid, there was still the same conveniences as the gas cars. There is not the long recharging time. Distances were not an obstacle because it still used the readily available gasoline infrastucture. Also, heat or air conditioning was not a problem any more. The battery size is a lot less due to the fact that the batteries could charge up during driving and did not need to store large amounts of energy. The electric conversion system also allows power regeneration. That is, when slowing down, and even braking, the motor turns into a generator and pushes the energy into the battery.

Ford and GM is designing a PHEV style hybrid. And the Prius is to be released with a PHEV style in 2010. The PHEV design allows the car to be plugged in electricity to be able to recharge. This will add the advantage that if you are doing short trips, less than about five miles, you may be able to do the whole trip on the energy in the battery and not have the gas engine start to recharge the battery. This can reduce the cost of fuel for the car considerably because the cost of electricity is, right now, cheaper then gasoline by a margin. If not, people would be running generators at home, and getting off the grid. And also think, until you bosses at work wise up, you could actually plug in at work and not have to pay for fuel anymore. It is not known if Ford and GM are planning more battery capacity than the current HEV hybrids have. IT would seem logical that they might.

Honda has produced a fuel cell driven car. It basically uses a 5000 psi tank that holds 4.2 kg of hydrogen. The hydrogen runs through a stacked fuel cell with anodes and cathodes, that, as the hydrogen mixes in with oxygen, produces electricity. They claim these vehicles get up to 280 miles per tank. It has an mpg equivelant of about 77, which is claimed to be about the highest on the market.

The draw back here is the infrastructure system for refilling the hydrogen tank. This technology needs to be considered and applied to the efficiency of the car. To compress the hydrogen to 5000 psi requires a lot of energy, which compromises the efficiency of this type of set up. However, if the heat from the compression can be recovered for general heating this appears to be better. Also, this system, as Honda is pushing it, converts natural gas to hydrogen. Well, in this case, why don't they just use natural gas in the car, which would not lose the energy during the conversion.

Another plus that can be derived from a fuel cell system, that if the system was coupled up at home with solar panels and/or home wind mill systems, the energy from this could be used for electrical electrolysis of water to produce the hydrogen and the power to compress it to 5000 psi. Maybe making this system the greener, more reliable system. It would have a low, if not zero CO2 footprint, but this is another subject.