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Environmentally Friendly Race Cars, Military Vehicles
jackelfish writes "The non-profit organization IdéeVerte Compétition has created a 'space age' race car that runs on Liquefied Petroleum Gas (propane or butane) and is lubricated with sunflower oil. Sponsored by the European Space Agency, the car recently broke the 'LPG powered vehicle' speed record of 315 km/h. The car also utilizes space technologies such as a titanium fuel tank, heat shielding developed for the Ariane launch vehicles and an EGNOS satellite navigation system to determine the speed, acceleration and position of the car in real-time." And reader gkbarr writes "Is the DoD feeling the crunch of sky-high gasoline prices or are they being overrun by a bunch of Greens? Who cares, the latest Humvee looks to be a more capable and greener machine than its predecessors."
Combining a standard internal-combustion-engine with an electric generator, and motors (which can also be run in reverse, when coasting / braking, thus returning the kinetic energy back into electrical power) is exactly the same idea, as Toyota have come up with in their family car, the "Prius" which is called the "Hybrid Synergy Drive"
I have driven a prius about 4 times now, and have managed to average, at "99.9 miles per gallon" as it says on the display. albeit, ive only managed that to last about 10 minutes, when doing around 40mph, on relatively flat land, but still its pretty damn good fuel economy
Actually, there's a lot of hybrid vehicle development going on at DoD - even for the current batch of HMMV's,
The militray is always interetsed in lower fuel consumption (as long as it doesn't degrade mission capabilities), because that means you have to haul less gas to the battlefield, lessening the logistical footprint. Fuel costs are a very small part of the equation - more of an added benefit than a driver, at least for combat and combat support vehicles.
In addition, hybrids can be more stealthy - less thermal signature, lower noise, etc. - which maes them better for many types of missions.
Size counts as wll - anything that helps load it (or more of them) into a C-130 or C-17 is a plus, especially since the US military is moving to lighter fast reaction forces that can be airlifted quickly to combat zones, rather than running massive convoys of ships that take days to get there.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
The hybrid Humvee project I heard about was not so much to reduce fuel consumption, though that was a side benefit. The main goal was to generate lots of electricity without having to tow a generator trailer.
It was also done with a different engine, and didn't include so many differences from the regular chassis. The one described in this article is by far a more advanced concept, and it looks like it's almost production ready.
It's too bad the civilian Hummer is just a Suburban now. I'd like to see one of these bad boys on the dealer's lot! (I'd imagine the local Ham radio survivalist types could build a whole comm station into one.)
Hybrids are also useful for vehicles with large electrical loads, which is the case for many military vehicles.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
This uses 4 electric motors in the wheels.
That means it doesn't need a sloppy differential
to let the wheels on the outside of a turn go
faster than the wheels on the inside of a turn.
The Prius, while nice, lacks this ability.
A Prius has a direct linkage from the engine to
the wheels; electric power is only an assist.
The Hummer H2 is not the civilian equivalent of the HMMWV, the H1 is. The H2 is a totally unrelated vehicle based on the Chevy Tahoe SUV. The military is obviously interested in reducing fuel consumption, as driving tankers of diesel around is a logistical nightmare, but really that's about the end of it. And at the end there's this glaring error:
OK, so the Shadow isn't replacing the "gas guzzling" Hummer, it's replacing the M151A2! The M151 is the good old fashioned jeep, with a tiny 4 cylinder gasoline engine. Hardly a gas guzzler. The author clearly wanted to put a "green" spin on the story, but didn't bother to research a number of his assumptions, the stupidest of which was assuming the M151A2 was the Hummer!
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
I think hydrogen counts as a natural fuel, and BMW have non-commercial versions going 300 km/h. The fact is that when you say electric vehicles crawl slower than snails you only mean top-end speed. An electric vehicle will leave its petrol equivalent dead at the lights. I think the massive increase in acceleration will be a big seller.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Actually, it is. In Europe lots of people convert their cars to run on natural gas, mostly because it costs way less than gasoline. Although this usually entails a small reduction in performance, the benefits as measured in lower operating costs by far outweight the disadvantages, such as lower autonomy caused by slightly higher fuel consumption and the loss of some trunk space (which is where the extra tank goes).
I'm surprised this hasn't caught on in the US, especially with the recent increase in oil prices. Cars that run on natural gas can revert to gasoline by simply flipping a switch.
I can only speak for American companies so other parts of the world are probably different, but I can say that over the past 10 years, American companies have started to become more fanatical about being 'green', at least with companies that deal with chemicals. 30 years ago in your average American corporate engineering lab they used all manner of horrible chemicals and it generally was not a big deal. They built things using terrible side products.
Over the past few years though, I have noticed a pretty dramatic change. All of the companies I have ended up working for (3) have been fanatically dedicated to 'greening up' and have put major amounts of money into changing processes over so that they use more green materials. In fact, a good way to get your project killed is to request the use of something hazardous when it isn't absolutely necessary.
The major reason this change, from my understanding as an engineer and not a policy marker in a company, is that companies are becoming more and more global. The Internet revolution made global companies much more viable and much more efficient. Even small companies are becoming very global. I worked at a company that had 500 people under it, but was located in something like 20 nations. The Internet and advances in IT has really made this sort of set up not only possible, but very effective. The net result is that whenever a company needs to make a product, they need to meet standards of every nations that they intend to sell it in. So, whoever has the lowest standards really IS the standard.
For instance, I was working with a company that was making power supplies. They used to make the batteries out of lead and some other ugly chemicals. They spent a massive pile of money trying to work the lead and other harmful chemicals out of it to meet an EU law. Another company that I worked for that did capacitor work did something similar when they put a pile of R&D money into meeting a Japanese law. I even was working in a project to meet a Chinese standard once - not that China is the most environmentally friendly nation in the world, but they do have some tough laws that they hold foreign businesses to but not their own domestic industries.
Whatever the case, people boo-hoo globalization for environmental reasons, but I can say that in the chemical industry in the US, globalization can take more credit then anything for the greening of the industry.