New project drives towards cleaner, greener cars

Imperial part of major £3.5 million consortium to develop next generation of sustainable vehicles

by Colin Smith

Creating the tools to help the UK automotive industry to develop the next generation of low emission vehicles will be the focus of a new £3.5 million academic consortium, which starts work this month.

The consortium, which includes engineers from Imperial College London, aims to devise new computer models to test the components and systems that power zero emission electric and hybrid vehicles. They hope this will lead to vehicles that are more affordable and better designed than current models.

Gregory Offer , from the Department of Earth Science and Engineering, who will lead Imperial’s project, says:

“Approximately 70 million cars are produced each year and only a fraction of them are low emission vehicles. We are still a long way off from developing low emission vehicles that can compete with their combustion engine cousins on performance and price. This project aims to provide much needed support to UK’s automotive industry so that ultimately, our motorways in 50 year’s time will be cleaner and greener.”

Low emission vehicles use electric motors, controlled by power electronics and powered by a combination of different technologies including batteries, fuel cells and supercapacitors. One of the current problems with low emission vehicles is there limited range. This is because they need many batteries and these can be very heavy, creating drag, which in turn means the cars use more energy.

As part of the project, the Imperial team will be creating computer models to help industry improve the performance of batteries, fuel cells and super capacitors, in order to reduce the number needed to run a vehicle. The models should allow engineers and designers to experiment with the configuration of various components.

This work is part of Imperial’s Electric and Hybrid Vehicle Network , which aims to reduce vehicle emissions and strengthen collaborations with industry and government. The network is part of the Energy Futures Lab (EFL), which is the College’s hub for interdisciplinary energy research.

Professor Nigel Brandon , EFL Director, adds: “The UK government has set the goal of largely decarbonising our road transport by 2050, which is a massive task. The only way that this will be achieved is if we pool the resources in this country to tackle the challenge head-on. The academic consortium will provide us with a unique opportunity to carry out research, share ideas and develop useful tools that will help the UK automotive industry to improve low emission vehicles, whilst also giving a competitive advantage to this key player in our economy. Much of my own research over the years has focussed on optimising fuel cells, so I will be really keen to see results that this project will yield.”

Other Imperial researchers involved in the project include Drs David Howey and Ricardo Martinez-Botas, who are both from the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

The name of the project is called the Fundamental Understanding of Technologies For Ultra Reduced Emission vehicles – the “FUTURE” project. Other consortium partners include the University of Oxford, Coventry University, Cranfield University and Loughborough University.