Starkadhr's story links

Infineon and Auto Electronics sponsored the Rev Up Fuel Efficiency Design Contest, where engineers took the "green challenge" to design a solution using Infineon products that enables or improves energy efficiency for automotive applications. The goal: increase the car fleet fuel efficiency from today's 26.6 mpg to 35 mpg by 2012. When analyzing the differences between more or less fuel efficient cars, the list of technologies that add up to the difference can be surprisingly long. This in turn provides room for creativity and ideas how to approach this engineering "elephant" from different angles, using different techniques.

In Part 2 of this Engineering TV interview with Chak Man Yeung from NI Week, "Sunny" digs deeper into the University of Texas' solar "raycer". Featuring the National Instruments CompactRIO real-time programmable automation controller, the Samsung Solorean features one of the most sophisticated electrical systems in solar car "raycing". While the CompactRIO is primarily for battery protection, it also does state of charge calculations, cell balancing, array control, cruise control, HMI (via a touch screen), and telemetry.

The University of Texas Solar Vehicles Team is a student organization sponsored by the Cockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. Under the guidance of Professor Gary Hallock, students raise funds, design, build, test, and race vehicles powered only by the sun. At over 50 members strong, the team is currently hard at work building its new car for the North American Solar Challenge 2008, the Samsung Solorean.

At Carnegie Mellon University, Professor Elias Towe's group pursues research in basic optical and quantum phenomena in materials for applications in novel photonic devices that enable a new generation of information processing systems for communication, computation, and sensing.

 The Cyclone Waste Heat Engine (WHE) is a self-starting engine that operates runs on waste heat emanating from an external source, such as the exhaust from an internal (or external) combustion engine, or the direct burning of biomass (i.e., processing garbage into methane would not be required). The WHE is also designed to run efficiently on solar heat without the installation of costly photovoltaic panels.

The Jeep Renegade combines a lithium-ion battery pack with a small-displacement BLUETEC diesel engine, which together help it achieve a fuel economy of more than 110 miles per gallon.

AFS Trinity Power has developed two fully operational XH-150 SUV prototypes using off-the-shelf components that make it possible for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles to achieve 150 MPG, go 40 miles in all-electric mode, and use gasoline for additional unlimited miles in hybrid mode. The low-cost lithium batteries -- protected from excessive resistive heating by the ultracapacitors -- will make the XH-150 much less expensive to purchase.

The vision of Solix Biofuels is to unlock the complex secrets of one of the simplest organisms on Earth, microalgae, to create a commercially viable biofuel that will play a vital role in solving climate change and petroleum scarcity, without competing with global food supply.

Colorado State's EECL is actively working with Envirofit International to design low cost, high performance cookstoves for the developing world. Indoor air pollution from cookstoves causes over 1.5 million premature deaths each year. Through support from the Shell Foundation, the Engines and Energy Conversion Laboratory and Envirofit plan to disseminate 10 million improved cookstoves around the world in the next 5 years.

 Developing organic solar cells from polymers is a cheap and potentially simple alternative energy. New Jersey Institute of Technology's Dr. Somenath Mitra has developed solar cells that use a carbon nanotube complex. Nanotubes are 50,000 times smaller than a human hair, but one nanotube can conduct a current better than any electrical wire.

Cyclone’s Green Revolution Engine represents true “thinking outside the box.” This is because it is not a new variation of the internal combustion engine, but rather, a highly advanced External Combustion Engine.  Since the combustion is external to the mechanism, the Cyclone external combustion engine can run on any fuel, liquid or gaseous. Ethanol, diesel, gasoline, biomass: anything from municipal trash and agricultural waste to traditional fossil fuels can power the Green Revolution Engine – individually, or in combination.