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IWCMOGTVM Club Supporter
Join Date: Sep 2005
Location: Northern Suburbs Melbourne
Posts: 17,798
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Traditional engines still going strong
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Seems internal combustion engines will be the majority in 10 years time, but they will be smaller.
http://theage.drive.com.au/motor-new...0409-rwg5.html
Quote:
Traditional engines still going strong
RICHARD BLACKBURN
April 10, 2010 - 10:00AM
With all the hype surrounding electric vehicles, you could be forgiven for thinking the humble internal combustion engine was about to be laid to rest.
But, to borrow a phrase from Mark Twain, reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated.
Even the most ardent supporters of electric vehicles are tipping that by 2020, 90 per cent of new cars will be sold with internal combustion petrol or diesel engines.
While few doubt some form of electrification is an inescapable part of the car of the future, most experts see improving the efficiency of engine technology as a greater panacea for a warming planet than hurtling down the zero-emission highway.
Why? Because more efficient internal combustion engines can deliver climate benefits immediately and with more widespread effect than electric vehicles that, without serious government subsidies, will remain prohibitively expensive for years to come.
Armed with this knowledge, most car companies are spending as much time overhauling the internal combustion engine as they are on developing alternative powertrains.
The results have been, for the most part, pretty impressive. That's especially so at the premium end of the market, which has typically played host to the thirstiest fuel guzzlers.
Mercedes-Benz's new 5.5-litre V8 is 25 per cent more efficient than the engine it replaces, despite producing more power. Similar gains have been made by Land Rover, Ferrari, Porsche and Maserati. Supercars are using less fuel than family cars used 12 months ago.
The focus for most manufacturers is on squeezing more power out of smaller-capacity engines through turbocharging, supercharging, direct injection or, in some cases, all three.
By refining the whole internal combustion process to provide more accurate delivery of fuel and less wastage, manufacturers believe they can deliver the type of fuel-efficiency gains you'd typically achieve from a hybrid powertrain.
Volkswagen is leading the charge towards forced induction (feeding more air into the combustion process). The 1.4-litre turbocharged and supercharged engine in the latest Volkswagen Golf is a good example of what can be achieved with the technology.
Despite its smaller-capacity engine, the new Golf is more powerful than the old 2.0-litre model and almost one second quicker in the 0-100km/h sprint yet it uses 22 per cent less fuel.
Volkswagen's new Polo light car will raise the downsizing bar even further, with a turbocharged 1.2-litre engine expected to outperform the old 1.6-litre.
Other manufacturers are talking about fewer cylinders: Suzuki and Nissan both have three-cylinder powerplants in their smallest cars, the Alto and the new Micra (not yet released in Australia).
BMW has confirmed it is working on a three-cylinder engine for its 1-Series and 3-Series cars while rumours suggest it is also developing a two-cylinder version.
Others, such as Ford, are using small diesel engines to deliver hybrid-like fuel consumption. Ford's new Fiesta ECOnetic is Australia's most fuel-efficient car, ahead of the petrol-electric Toyota Prius.
But Nissan's senior vice-president of product planning, Andy Palmer, says the economics of the humble petrol engine still make a compelling argument, even against diesel engines.
"The advantage of a [petrol] engine over a diesel engine is that it's a whole lot cheaper to make and therefore easier to sell," he says. "It allows us to get the price point somewhere attractive."
Palmer says Nissan's approach to alternative fuels is to develop different solutions suited to different market segments. The company will launch an electric vehicle, the Leaf, later this year but will also persist with conventional engines.
"What's the point in putting a damned expensive diesel engine or hybrid engine into a small car when you can achieve the same kind of result at a much lower cost?" he says. "Obviously, you then give access to a lot more people to enjoy those benefits of low fuel costs or low CO2, depending on your perspective."
Mazda Australia managing director Doug Dickson agrees, saying that by 2020 "between 80 and 98 per cent" of cars will be powered by internal-combustion engines.
"We will have [fuel consumption] reductions of 30 per cent [by 2015]," Dickson says, referring to Mazda's new Sky range of more-efficient engines to be teamed with stop-start technology and other fuel-saving measures.
"And it doesn't rely on massive public infrastructure investment."
Palmer says providing greener motoring solutions only works if the customer doesn't have to pay a penalty for going green.
"Generally speaking, if you've got a basic choice between this car and that car and there's no big difference except that this car has zero emissions or lower emissions, then you'll tend to go with the green choice," he says. "But if you're asked to pay a premium for the green choice, you may not. Our intention is to give consumers that option without having to pay a premium for it."
But Palmer admits the ultimate goal is to slowly wean the consumer off internal-combustion engine power.
"We're saying that in 2020 we expect 10 per cent of our fleet to be pure electric," he says.
"There's only so much you can do with the internal-combustion engine . . . after that you've got to give it some sort of assistance and electric power is the most logical place to go looking for that assistance. My prediction is that by 2020 or 2025, every car will have some form of electrical assistance."
But Palmer says pure electric drive was not practical for heavier vehicles such as large cars and off-roaders.
"As the vehicles get heavier, the technology doesn't support that yet so it's more natural to go down the route of clean diesel or hybrid," he says.
As part of this "horses for courses" approach, Nissan is focusing on reducing weight and engine size, as well as improving aerodynamics, to reduce the environmental impact of the conventional internal-combustion vehicle.
Nissan's project director for Micra, Vincent Cobee, says the biggest challenge is to change customer perceptions of what they really need in a vehicle.
"The attitudes are changing very quickly ... how [much] horsepower do you need in a city car?" Cobee says.
"There is a perception that inter-city driving requires a large engine. That perception has been completely killed in Europe and in Japan because of regulation and traffic jams."
One of the biggest enemies of more fuel-efficient cars is the gradual increase in weight that comes with every new model, thanks to safety regulations and customer demand for more gadgets and creature comforts. The latest Ford Falcon, for example, is 600 kilograms heavier than the first one, launched in 1960.
"How did we compensate for this [weight increase]? We compensated by engine power increase," Cobee says.
Car companies are tackling the problem one kilogram at a time.
The latest Mazda2 has a long aerial because a shorter, stubbier one would have required a booster unit, adding a few grams. Holden Commodores now have optional spare tyres - all in the name of saving weight and giving the car a lower fuel rating on its compulsory windscreen sticker.
On the new Micra, Nissan reduced the weight of the car through a series of tiny gains.
For example, the company didn't paint the instrument panel. It also redesigned the petrol tank for a seven-kilogram advantage and used corrugated surfaces on the underbelly of the car to retain stiffness while taking out weight.
The same approach was taken to the roof, where a boomerang-shaped ridge improves the stiffness of the roof surface, reducing the common booming noise created by vibration at higher speeds. The new design allowed the development team to remove the usual damping material in the ceiling of the cabin.
"The writing is on the wall. The best way to improve fuel economy is to reduce weight," Cobee says.
Mercedes-Benz's head of research for alternative fuels, Herbert Kohler, says traditional internal-combustion engines will remain the "bread and butter for the next 15 to 20 years, of course being supported by electrification".
"All kinds of transformations in the energy sector - from wood to coal, from coal to oil, from oil to gas - have always been an evolutionary development, not some kind of revolution," he says.
Mercedes plans to have electric versions of the Smart and A-Class city cars in the showroom next year.
Kohler says electric vehicles will struggle to gain sales momentum without some form of government support to offset the high development costs and low initial volumes of electric-car production.
"The first step is the most critical one," he says. "When you start with low volumes, there should be some form of compensation in order to start a snowball effect."
There is a danger, he says, that if the industry tries to move too quickly it could damage the reputation of electric vehicles and delay take-up of the technology.
"I don't think that we should push that and bring products on the market that are not mature enough and will bring problems for the customer," Kohler says.
There lies one of the great attractions of the internal-combustion engine. In many ways it is the devil we know. Industrial internal-combustion engines have been around in various guises since the 19th century. By contrast, hybrid vehicles are little more than a decade old and electric vehicles, after a stillborn revival in the '90s, are in the infancy of their development for commercial production.
One of the big concerns remains the battery life of electric vehicles. Toyota and Honda are the only two major car companies with long-term experience in the area, although Toyota's is with nickel-metal hydride batteries, rather than new-generation lithium-ion batteries.
Ominously, Toyota says it chose nickel-metal hydride batteries for their durability and reliability.
There are industry concerns that the batteries could be the stumbling block to consumer acceptance of the technology, particularly if they prove as unreliable and prone to problems as mobile phones and notebook computers.
When a battery accounts for 40 per cent of the total cost of a car, reliability and durability become paramount. An average internal-combustion engine, by contrast, can typically run for at least 200,000 kilometres, which equates to about 13 years of average driving.
Then there's the issue of range. Holden's Commodore fitted with a new direct-injection 3.0-litre V6 can drive from Melbourne to Sydney on one tank, while a number of diesels are good for well over 1000 kilometres on a single fill.
By contrast, 200 kilometres appears to be the upper limit of most electric vehicles. Experience with a Mini electric-vehicle trial in the US suggests EV range could be further reduced in cold weather.
Nissan admits Australia's hot weather means greater airconditioning use and more electrical load on the batteries.
Nissan Australia managing director Dan Thompson says range issues are likely to consign the electric car to the role of support vehicle in the Australian household for some years to come.
"It's probably more likely that it will be the second car in the household," he says.
The head of Nissan's zero-emissions division, Hideaki Watanabe, agrees.
"That's the situation in the US. They will have a big car to travel a long distance with big loads and the whole family but for everyday use they'll use the Leaf," he says. General Motors says it has a solution to EV range anxiety: an internal-combustion engine. Its much-lauded Volt EV has a guilty secret, a small internal-combustion petrol engine - effectively an on-board generator - that acts as a "range extender" for the electric motor when it runs out of charge.
GM justifies the reliance on conventional petrol power by arguing that electric cars only provide a partial solution to zero-emissions mobility because they don't have the range for long journeys. Thompson disagrees. "If someone wants a pure zero-emissions solution, the Leaf or a pure electric car is the only solution," he says.
"So a range extender, yeah, I guess it gets over consumer anxiety over possibly depleting your battery and running out in the middle of nowhere but that's the same issue we have with an internal-combustion engine — you can be driving along in the desert and run out of gas.
"I think their solution is a partial solution for zero emissions and the environment."
Toyota Australia's product planning manager, Peter Evans, says electrification of vehicles will happen "with some aggression" in the next five to 10 years but that doesn't necessarily mean electric vehicles per se.
"The next big step is to be able to capture the kinetic energy of the vehicle and convert it into the only easily created and stored energy, which is electricity," he says.
Regenerative brake systems, which recover kinetic energy from the braking process and store it for later use, have been available on Japanese hybrids such as the Prius for more than a decade, but the rest of the industry is finally catching up.
Some energy-capturing innovations include smart alternators that transform into generators when the engine isn't under load, flywheels that capture energy and feed back into batteries and stop-start systems that shut down the engine when it would normally idle at a set of traffic lights. Aerodynamics and low-rolling-resistance tyres also help to make internal combustion greener.
Evans says electric energy is ideal for motor vehicles because "you can generate it quickly, you can store it quickly and you can give it back quickly".
Other solutions for improving the internal-combustion engine include direct fuel injection into the cylinder, low-friction engine parts, low-weight valves and systems designed to allow engineers to run engines at higher temperatures, and using high-pressure cooling systems rather than big radiators that produce drag.
Some systems have been used in motor sport for several years but are only now being adopted by the mainstream.
"Ultimately, cars should leave the smallest possible heat signature out the back because that's wasted energy," Evans says.
"The step change, the paradigm shift, is to capture the kinetic energy that you've generated using your internal-combustion engine, turn it into electrical energy and then give it back to the car when it needs it to reduce the demand on the petrol engine."
Alive and revving — features that will bring new life to the internal combustion engine
1 Turbochargers and/or superchargers with smaller-capacity engines produce more power for less fuel.
2 Stop-start technology reduces fuel wastage at idle, while direct injection of fuel into the cylinder improves efficiency.
3 Alternative fuels, including diesel, liquified petroleum gas and ethanol-dominant E85 petrol, can be more powerful, efficient and cheaper to run.
4 Lightweight components, body panels and engine parts, plus improved aerodynamics and lower rolling-resistance tyres, reduce engine load.
5 Regenerative braking recovers heat energy and delivers it to the battery, reducing engine load and fuel use.
Sparks start to fly over cost
After more than a decade of widespread scepticism, the car industry has broadly accepted that its long-term future depends on electrification.
But even the most ardent electric-vehicle supporters admit there are significant hurdles to increasing the number of zero-emission cars on the roads.
The two biggest barriers to widespread buyer acceptance are price and range.
Nissan has just announced its Leaf electric car will cost about $US33,000 ($36,000) in the US, well above the odds for a vehicle of its size. General Motors is expected to sell its Volt EV for more than $US40,000, while Mitsubishi's i MiEV sells in Japan for the equivalent of about $70,000.
Combine this with the fact each can travel less than 200 kilometres on electric power alone and the attraction for the average motorist is hard to see.
The key to acceptance lies in government subsidies and infrastructure support. Neither appears to be on the federal government's agenda at this stage, despite the fact all three EVs are earmarked for local sales by 2012.
Nissan's and Mitsubishi's approaches to the government have so far fallen on deaf ears and Nissan senior vice-president of product planning, Andy Palmer, says such indifference could prompt the company to divert supply of the Leaf elsewhere.
"Where governments are helpful, then obviously the country gets the car earlier," Palmer says.
In Europe, government incentives of up to €5000 ($7340) are being offered, while in the US a $US7500 tax break is offered.
Without some form of local financial incentive or infrastructure support, it's hard to see Australia leading the charge to an all-electric fleet. "It's a two-way street," Palmer says.
The head of Nissan's zero-emissions division, Hideaki Watanabe, admits range anxiety is another big hurdle.
Nissan is looking at a roadside assistance service for electric vehicles that run out of charge, but it sounds far from ideal.
"It could be a quick charge," Watanabe says. "In the worst cases, it's going to be a tow-away."
He admits that cold weather also limits driving range. Trials of the Mini electric car in the US have revealed that range can be severely depleted by on-board heaters and airconditioning.
"The cold weather will affect the range because probably you will use the heater and stuff like that," Watanabe says. "But at the same time, what you can do is
pre-heat the car before you start. That will prevent the loss of mileage."
Nissan Australia chief executive officer Dan Thompson says hot weather will create similar problems in Australia.
"If you get in the car on a hot day and crank up the airconditioning, it will certainly deplete the range more quickly."
From the tip to your fuel tank
Used nappies and last night's takeaway could prove to be unlikely saviours for the internal combustion engine.
Holden is one of a number of companies looking at converting humble household waste into ethanol as an alternative to relying on the world's dwindling supplies of crude oil. The technology uses bacteria that feeds off carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and hydrogen, excreting ethanol.
Holden hopes to encourage ethanol use in Australia by developing a version of its top-selling Commodore that can run on a mix of 85 per cent ethanol and 15 per cent petrol, known as E85. At the moment, most petrol cars can only accept a blend containing 10 per cent ethanol (E10).
The company says ethanol can potentially reduce Australia's reliance on crude oil by up to 30 per cent. The major problem is infrastructure. There are fewer than half-a-dozen E85 fuelling stations in the country, although Caltex has committed to expanding the number of pumps.
LPG is another potential replacement for crude oil, although the fuel has struggled to gain acceptance from new-car buyers, despite government subsidies and a much cheaper pump price. Holden and Ford, however, both still see big potential in LPG as both petrol and diesel inevitably become more expensive.
Australia has huge natural reserves of LPG and the fuel is also claimed to be less harmful to the ozone layer than petrol, while polluting less than diesel.
A third alternative being explored is compressed natural gas (CNG). As with LPG, it is in plentiful supply in Australia, although as it requires significantly more storage space than petrol, range is restricted. Holden is, however, persevering with studies of the fuel and says it could be possible to develop a refuelling system based on conventional household natural gas outlets.
Meanwhile, internal combustion engines that burn hydrogen are still in development, although BMW has suspended testing of its hydrogen-powered 7-Series.
Other manufacturers, including Mercedes, are dismissive of the technology.
For more on how cars work, go to drive.com.au/motoring-101
Source: The Sydney Morning Herald
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Daniel
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10-04-2010, 04:37 PM
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