Hybrid haven
Tech team receives $1.5 million grant for flex-fuel researchBy LAYLA ASLANI, DMG Writer
HOUGHTON - Researchers at Michigan Technological University have received a $1.5 million grant from the Michigan Public Service Commission to develop technologies for flex-fuel hybrid vehicles.
As part of the project, the team aims to design and build an efficient, four-cylinder, hybrid engine with a variable compression ratio that can run on flex-fuel and meet the Environmental Protection Agency's emissions standards.
"Our goal is to improve design capacities and develop technology to enable flex-fuel hybrid internal combustion engines, so that means we can operate engines efficiently and cleanly with high-ethanol concentrations," said lead investigator Jeff Naber, an associate professor of mechanical engineering-engineering mechanics and director of Michigan Tech's Advanced Power Systems Research Center.
Flex-fuel engines can burn pure gasoline and a blend of ethanol and gas, like E85. The properties of the two fuels vary tremendously, creating engineering challenges. If engines can't adapt to these very different fuels, emissions rise and mileage falls, Naber said. Starting and stopping the engine repeatedly worsens the problem, and that's what hybrid engines do many times during a single trip, whenever the vehicle switches from battery to internal combustion and back again.
U.S. ethanol is typically made from corn, but Naber said the technologies his team is developing would be applicable to all forms of ethanol. He said other researchers in Michigan Tech's Wood to Wheels program, of which his team is a part of, are looking to develop ethanol from non-food resources such as biomass and waste streams.
Naber said the work his team does will influence General Motors projects.
"That will come in a number of different ways, so the test results that we produce will help them understand how to design and control their engines better," he said. "We're working on software to help them understand combustion and emissions within this field of alternative fuels combustion."
However, it is not only GM that will benefit from the project. Several graduate students and undergraduate students are working on the project on campus, at GM and at Argonne National Laboratory's Transpor-tation Technology Research & Development Center in Chicago, Naber said.
"We're producing students that are knowledgeable about this," he said. "This will help us get off petroleum, improve fuel mileage and help us get away from our dependency on foreign oil."
The MPSC grant builds on over $1 million in support from GM, Sensors Inc. of Saline, Argonne National Laboratory and Michigan Tech.
Co-investigators on the project are Jay Meldrum, director of the Keweenaw Research Center; Donna Michalek and John Beard, associate professors of mechanical engineering-engineering mechanics; Seong-Young Lee, Scott Miers and Abhijit Mukherjee, assistant professors of mechanical engineering-engineering mechanics; and Jeremy Worm, staff engineer of the Advanced Power Systems Research Center, which is directed by Naber.
Layla Aslani can be reached at laslani@mininggazette.com.
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jimbob
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01-08-09 11:18 AM
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Let's burn our food in our cars. That's real smart. The state of Michigan has a huge deficit so now they give 1.5 million to see how we can improve burning our food in our cars. Who pays for this? The consumer of course when you use public utilities like gas and electric etc. What a joke.
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