Getting your V6 to act like a V8, while saving gas

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The history of engine improvements in the U.S. has tended primarily in one direction: raw horsepower. Engines have gotten bigger and more powerful over time—and that's certainly what automakers have used as a key selling point. But U.S. automaker Ford has decided to take turbocharging and direct fuel injection in another direction: fuel efficiency.Yesterday, Ford began production of what it's calling the EcoBoost engine: a new gasoline motor that employs turbocharging, direct fuel injection, variable timing in the valves that control fuel and exhaust flow to make a smaller, lighter six-cylinder engine perform like an eight-cylinder engine.* When these technologies are combined, "you can now significantly downsize the engine," says mechanical engineer Dan Kapp, Ford's director for power train research. "The fuel efficiency comes from a much smaller displacement engine providing equal or, in most cases, superior performance to the engine you're replacing."In essence, the new engine works by using the turbocharging to deliver more air to the fuel burning chamber, variable valve timing to fully flush exhaust gas after combustion in the chamber and then direct injection to overcome any knocking issues.

The company estimates the new engines—which will begin appearing in the Lincoln MKS and MKZ and the Ford Flex and Taurus this summer—can deliver at least 10 percent more miles-per-gallon and therefore reduced emissions of carbon dioxide. By 2013, the company plans to produce 1.3 million vehicles with EcoBoost engines in them, including 90 percent of all Ford vehicles sold in the U.S.Of course, such cars will be more expensive than current models, though Kapp declined to specify a price tag, saying only that fuel savings could pay for it "on the order of two years or less" at today's fuel prices. That’s compared to much longer payback times for diesels or hybrids (which Ford is also producing). Ultimately, the EcoBoost engine will also have to cope with alternative fuels, and Ford plans in the longer-term future to move more towards hybrids and electric vehicles. But for the next decade or so, Ford will be relying on these engines to meet some of the new fuel efficiency targets announced this week and reduce pollution. "What Ford is doing uniquely here is leveraging [EcoBoost] to deliver fuel efficiency through aggressive downsizing [of the engine] as opposed to the performance type approach," Kapp says. But it remains to be seen whether a car company that has spent years and millions of advertising dollars touting the horsepower that can be gained from such improvements (at the expense of fuel efficiency) can convince customers to change direction too.
Image 1: Lincoln MKZ engine. Copyright 2009—Ford Motor Company and Wieck Photo Database

Battery-powered Vehicles To Be Revolutionized By New Technology

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ScienceDaily (May 11, 2009) — Thousands of small electric scooters, bicycles and wheelchairs throughout Europe and Asia are powered by LifePO4 –- a material used in advanced lithium-ion batteries developed by Université de Montréal researchers.

"It's a revolutionary battery because it is made from non-toxic materials abundant in the Earth's crust. Plus, it's not expensive,'" says Michel Gauthier, an invited professor at the Université de Montréal Department of Chemistry and co-founder of Phostech Lithium, the company that makes the battery material. "This battery could eventually make the electric car very profitable."
The theory will soon be tested, since the 100 percent electric Microcar that's set to debut in Europe this year will be and powered by the LifePO4 battery.
Phostech Lithium's production plant in St. Bruno, Quebec, produces the black LifePO4 powder, which is shipped across the world in tightly sealed barrels.
"The theoretical principle behind the battery was patented by a University of Texas professor in 1995. However, without the work of local chemists such as Nathalie Ravet, we couldn't have developed it," says Phostech Lithium engineer Denis Geoffroy.
Süd-Chemie, a leading specialty chemistry company based in Germany, first invested in Phostech Lithium in 2005. Now, just four years later, Süd-Chemie's total Canadian investments have reached $13 million and it stands as the 100% owner of Phostech Lithium. Phostech's St. Bruno plant began to produce LiFePO4 in 2006 with 20 employees and a 400 metric-ton capacity. Since then, Phostech has nearly doubled its staff.
"It is a battery that is much more stable and much safer," says Dean MacNeil, a professor at the Université de Montréal's Department of Chemistry and new NSERC-Phostech Lithium Industrial Research Chair in Energy Storage and Conversion. "In addition, it recharges much faster than previous batteries."
The NSERC Research Chair, funded in part by Phostech Lithium, will help investigate ways to improve the LifePO4 battery.
For Gauthier, Phostech Lithium is the product of academia and the business world coming together. "Even if we knew that lithium, iron and phosphate were theoretically promising materials, we had to make them efficient. We had to find the right voltage and maintain the right charging and discharging properties. This is where the university played a major role."
Adapted from materials provided by University of Montreal.

Will America's Power Grid Be Able To Keep Pace With Future Demand?

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ScienceDaily (May 8, 2009) — America's power grid today resembles the country's canal system of the 19th Century. A marvel of engineering for its time, the canal system eventually could not keep pace with the growing demands of transcontinental transportation.

More than 150 years later, America's infrastructure is again changing in ways that its designers never anticipated. Distributed and intermittent electricity generation, such as wind power, is rapidly expanding, new smart meters are giving consumers more control over their energy usage, and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles may someday radically increase the overall demand for electricity.
The evolution of America's energy needs has forced scientists and engineers to re-examine the operations, efficiency and security of the national power grid. The creation of a more secure and efficient national power grid requires significant innovations in the way we transmit electricity and monitor its use.
To better assess the challenges facing the power grid, the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory hosted a workshop that brought together power system and modeling experts from federal agencies, national laboratories and academia.
"Modeling and simulation have proved to be effective tools for the power industry on many levels," said Mark Petri, Argonne's technology development director and one of the workshop's organizers. "We need to develop a comprehensive and integrated approach that will enable us to better understand the full implications of an evolving power grid as we plan for future demand and power sources."
The workshop centered on the need for new methods to simulate the national power grid by modeling the creation and flow of electric power as well as the grid's connection to other critical infrastructures, such as transportation, gas, water and communications. Through detailed simulations of how electric power is supplied and transferred around the country, researchers can bolster not only the grid's security but also its reliability, efficiency and resiliency.
"Implementing smart grid technologies on a large scale will not be trivial," Petri added. "The challenges go beyond technical and economic issues. The smart grid technologies could fundamentally change how national power grid systems operate and respond to disruptions."
Because of the great diversity of ways in which electricity is created, distributed and consumed, engineers face a challenge in creating reliable models of large power networks. They have to deal with the intermittent nature of some of the sources (like wind or solar), optimize how power is transmitted and balance economic, security and environmental priorities when finding solutions.
"In the short-term," Petri said, "these simulations could help devise ways to solve the problem of grid congestion, which currently costs consumers many hundreds of millions of dollars each year. Even small improvements in grid efficiency that better models and simulations would produce would make the investment cost-effective."
The workshop, which was sponsored by U.S. Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate, identified barriers that a national grid simulation capability would need to overcome to be effective. The findings of the workshop appear in the report "National Power Grid Simulation Capability: Needs and Issues." According to Petri, an operational plan for a national power grid simulation capability that engages industry to better understand their needs, capabilities and concerns would support a more secure and reliable electric power grid system for the future.
Adapted from materials provided by DOE/Argonne National Laboratory.

Animals On Runways Can Cause Serious Problems At Small Airports

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ScienceDaily (May 9, 2009) — It's a bird. It's a plane. It's a potentially deadly combination.

A Purdue University study of 10 small Indiana airports found that animals can gain easy access to runways and infield areas, increasing the likelihood of planes striking those animals.
Animal strikes received national attention in January. Commercial pilot and Purdue alumnus Charles "Sully" Sullenberger was forced to land in the Hudson River after his plane hit a flock of Canada geese.
The study by Gene Rhodes, a professor of forestry and natural resources, documented that animals found ways through damaged fences or unfenced areas onto airport properties. Spotting deer, coyote and other animals in dangerous places was common.
"Just about every pilot we talked to at these airports said that during a landing they've had to pull up to avoid hitting an animal on the runway," Rhodes said. "With the size of planes using these airports, hitting a rabbit could flip a plane."
While Rhodes' study looked only at Indiana airports, he said there are thousands of airports all over the country that don't have the budgets to adequately fence their properties, endangering countless flights each year.
In the study, only four of the Indiana airports had fences around the entire perimeter, and even those had maintenance problems - such as holes dug under fences, access through culverts and holes in fences - that allowed animals onto the properties.
Despite the desire to keep animals away, Rhodes said airports often are a magnet for wildlife. Airports are required to own property around runways that is often rented to farmers. While that increases airports' meager budgets, those crops can attract animals looking for food.
"What you have planted affects what type of animals will be there," Rhodes said. "Even if you have certain grasses, you have small mammals that eat those, and those attract red-tailed hawks. A red-tailed hawk can bring down a small plane as fast as anything."
Previous studies cited in Rhodes' paper have shown that wildlife strikes cost more than a half a billion dollars each year and have been responsible for more than 350 human deaths in the last century. Travis DeVault, who co-authored the paper as Rhodes' postdoctoral researcher and is now a field station and project leader with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Wildlife Services, said wildlife strikes have become more common in recent years.
"Many of the most hazardous species are increasing in population size. For example, about two-thirds of the largest bird species have shown population increases during the past 30 years," DeVault said. "Also, air traffic continues to increase. More birds in combination with more flights leads to more bird strikes."
DeVault added that new technology means planes are quieter today, giving birds less time to detect and avoid being struck.
Rhodes' study suggests enclosing 100 percent of airport perimeters with partially buried fencing, which keeps animals from tunneling underneath. Frequent maintenance also is key because many of the animals observed during the study entered the airports through damaged fences.
"If airports can use this study to show their needs, it can allow them to go after federal grants they need to make improvements," Rhodes said.
The Joint Transportation Research Program of the Indiana Department of Transportation and the Aviation Association of Indiana funded the research. Rhodes said the next step is to determine viable economic uses that also will deter wildlife from the land around airports.
Journal reference:
Travis L. DeVault, Jacob E. Kubel, David J. Glista and Olin E. Rhodes Jr. Mammalian Hazards at Small Airports in Indiana: Impact of Perimeter Fencing. Human-Wildlife Conflicts, Fall 2008
Adapted from materials provided by Purdue University.

Bioelectricity Promises More 'Miles Per Acre' Than Ethanol

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ScienceDaily (May 8, 2009) — Biofuels such as ethanol offer an alternative to petroleum for powering our cars, but growing energy crops to produce them can compete with food crops for farmland, and clearing forests to expand farmland will aggravate the climate change problem. How can we maximize our "miles per acre" from biomass?

Researchers writing in the online edition of the journal Science on May 7 say the best bet is to convert the biomass to electricity, rather than ethanol. They calculate that, compared to ethanol used for internal combustion engines, bioelectricity used for battery-powered vehicles would deliver an average of 80% more miles of transportation per acre of crops, while also providing double the greenhouse gas offsets to mitigate climate change.
"It's a relatively obvious question once you ask it, but nobody had really asked it before," says study co-author Chris Field, director of the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution. "The kinds of motivations that have driven people to think about developing ethanol as a vehicle fuel have been somewhat different from those that have been motivating people to think about battery electric vehicles, but the overlap is in the area of maximizing efficiency and minimizing adverse impacts on climate."
Field, who is also a professor of biology at Stanford University and a senior fellow at Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment, is part of a research team that includes lead author Elliott Campbell of the University of California, Merced, and David Lobell of Stanford's Program on Food Security and the Environment. The researchers performed a life-cycle analysis of both bioelectricity and ethanol technologies, taking into account not only the energy produced by each technology, but also the energy consumed in producing the vehicles and fuels. For the analysis, they used publicly available data on vehicle efficiencies from the US Environmental Protection Agency and other organizations.
Bioelectricity was the clear winner in the transportation-miles-per-acre comparison, regardless of whether the energy was produced from corn or from switchgrass, a cellulose-based energy crop. For example, a small SUV powered by bioelectricity could travel nearly 14,000 highway miles on the net energy produced from an acre of switchgrass, while a comparable internal combustion vehicle could only travel about 9,000 miles on the highway. (Average mileage for both city and highway driving would be 15,000 miles for a biolelectric SUV and 8,000 miles for an internal combustion vehicle.)
"The internal combustion engine just isn't very efficient, especially when compared to electric vehicles," says Campbell. "Even the best ethanol-producing technologies with hybrid vehicles aren't enough to overcome this."
The researchers found that bioelectricity and ethanol also differed in their potential impact on climate change. "Some approaches to bioenergy can make climate change worse, but other limited approaches can help fight climate change," says Campbell. "For these beneficial approaches, we could do more to fight climate change by making electricity than making ethanol."
The energy from an acre of switchgrass used to power an electric vehicle would prevent or offset the release of up to 10 tons of CO2 per acre, relative to a similar-sized gasoline-powered car. Across vehicle types and different crops, this offset averages more than 100% larger for the bioelectricity than for the ethanol pathway. Bioelectricity also offers more possibilities for reducing greenhouse gas emissions through measures such as carbon capture and sequestration, which could be implemented at biomass power stations but not individual internal combustion vehicles.
While the results of the study clearly favor bioelectricity over ethanol, the researchers caution that the issues facing society in choosing an energy strategy are complex. "We found that converting biomass to electricity rather than ethanol makes the most sense for two policy-relevant issues: transportation and climate," says Lobell. "But we also need to compare these options for other issues like water consumption, air pollution, and economic costs."
"There is a big strategic decision our country and others are making: whether to encourage development of vehicles that run on ethanol or electricity," says Campbell. "Studies like ours could be used to ensure that the alternative energy pathways we chose will provide the most transportation energy and the least climate change impacts."
This research was funded through a grant from the Stanford University Global Climate and Energy Project, with additional support from the Stanford University Food Security and Environment Project, The University of California at Merced, the Carnegie Institution for Science, and a NASA New Investigator Grant. .
* to be published in the May 22, 2009 print edition.
Journal reference:
J. E. Campbell, D. B. Lobell, and C. B. Field. Greater Transportation Energy and GHG Offsets from Bioelectricity Than Ethanol. Science, 2009; DOI: 10.1126/science.1168885
Adapted from materials provided by Carnegie Institution.

'Smart Turbine Blades' To Improve Wind Power

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ScienceDaily (May 8, 2009) — Researchers have developed a technique that uses sensors and computational software to constantly monitor forces exerted on wind turbine blades, a step toward improving efficiency by adjusting for rapidly changing wind conditions.

The research by engineers at Purdue University and Sandia National Laboratories is part of an effort to develop a smarter wind turbine structure.
"The ultimate goal is to feed information from sensors into an active control system that precisely adjusts components to optimize efficiency," said Purdue doctoral student Jonathan White, who is leading the research with Douglas Adams, a professor of mechanical engineering and director of Purdue's Center for Systems Integrity.
The system also could help improve wind turbine reliability by providing critical real-time information to the control system to prevent catastrophic wind turbine damage from high winds.
"Wind energy is playing an increasing role in providing electrical power," Adams said. "The United States is now the largest harvester of wind energy in the world. The question is, what can be done to wind turbines to make them more efficient, more cost effective and more reliable?"
The engineers embedded sensors called uniaxial and triaxial accelerometers inside a wind turbine blade as the blade was being built. The blade is now being tested on a research wind turbine at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agriculture Research Service laboratory in Bushland, Texas. Personnel from Sandia and the USDA operate the research wind turbines at the Texas site.
Such sensors could be instrumental in future turbine blades that have "control surfaces" and simple flaps like those on an airplane's wings to change the aerodynamic characteristics of the blades for better control. Because these flaps would be changed in real time to respond to changing winds, constant sensor data would be critical.
"This is a perfect example of a partnership between a national lab and an academic institution to develop innovations by leveraging the expertise of both," said Jose R. Zayas, manager of Sandia's Wind Energy Technology Department.
Research findings show that using a trio of sensors and "estimator model" software developed by White accurately reveals how much force is being exerted on the blades. Purdue and Sandia have applied for a provisional patent on the technique.
Findings are detailed in a paper being presented May 4 during the Windpower 2009 Conference & Exhibition in Chicago. The paper was written by White, Adams and Sandia engineer Mark A. Rumsey and Zayas. The four-day conference, organized by the American Wind Energy Association, attracts thousands of attendees and is geared toward industry.
"Industry is most interested in identifying loads, or forces, exerted on turbine blades and predicting fatigue, and this work is a step toward accomplishing that," White said.
A wind turbine's major components include rotor blades, a gearbox and generator. The wind turbine blades are made primarily of fiberglass and balsa wood and occasionally are strengthened with carbon fiber.
"The aim is to operate the generator and the turbine in the most efficient way, but this is difficult because wind speeds fluctuate," Adams said. "You want to be able to control the generator or the pitch of the blades to optimize energy capture by reducing forces on the components in the wind turbine during excessively high winds and increase the loads during low winds. In addition to improving efficiency, this should help improve reliability. The wind turbine towers can be 200 feet tall or more, so it is very expensive to service and repair damaged components."
Sensor data in a smart system might be used to better control the turbine speed by automatically adjusting the blade pitch while also commanding the generator to take corrective steps.
"We envision smart systems being a potentially huge step forward for turbines," said Sandia's Rumsey. "There is still a lot of work to be done, but we believe the payoff will be great. Our goal is to provide the electric utility industry with a reliable and efficient product. We are laying the groundwork for the wind turbine of the future."
Sensor data also will be used to design more resilient blades.
The sensors are capable of measuring acceleration occurring in various directions, which is necessary to accurately characterize the blade's bending and twisting and small vibrations near the tip that eventually cause fatigue and possible failure.
The sensors also measure two types of acceleration. One type, the dynamic acceleration, results from gusting winds, while the other, called static acceleration, results from gravity and the steady background winds. It is essential to accurately measure both forms of acceleration to estimate forces exerted on the blades. The sensor data reveal precisely how much a blade bends and twists from winds.
The research is ongoing, and the engineers are now pursuing the application of their system to advanced, next-generation turbine blades that are more curved than conventional blades. This more complex shape makes it more challenging to apply the technique.
In 2008 the United States added 8,358 megawatts of new wind-power capacity, which equates to thousands of new turbines since the average wind turbine generates 1.5 megawatts. The new capacity increased the total U.S. installed wind power to 25,170 megawatts, surpassing Germany's capacity as the world's largest harvester of wind power.
"Our aim is to do two things - improve reliability and prevent failure - and the most direct way to enable those two capabilities is by monitoring forces exerted on the blades by winds," Adams said.
The research is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy through Sandia National Laboratories. Sandia is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corp., a Lockheed Martin Co., for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-AC04-94AL85000.
Journal reference:
White et al. Operational load estimation of a smart wind turbine rotor blade. Proceedings of SPIE, 2009; 72952D DOI: 10.1117/12.815802
Adapted from materials provided by Purdue University.