Greening the transport industry – cleaner and more efficient vehicles

Argonne's Transportation Technology R&D Center brings together scientists and engineers from many disciplines to seek innovative, cost-effective solutions to the challenges of trans porting people and goods. Research at the center focuses on several areas, including batteries, fuel cells, vehicle systems, engine research, applied materials research, technology and systems assessments and recycling.

As a national laboratory working in the national interest, Argonne helps ensure a reliable supply of efficient and clean energy for the future by working closely with industry to develop technologies that reduce the United States' dependence on foreign energy sources. To that end, Argonne researchers focus on collaborative research with several different sectors of the transporta tion industry, working with each to understand their R&D needs and help develop solutions for their markets.

"We're the only lab in the Midwest really focused on this industry," says Don Hillebrand, director of Argonne's Center for Transportation Research.

"But we're not a 'rah, rah' organization that cham pions a particular technology," adds Larry Johnson, director of the Transportation Technology R&D Center. "We are unbiased researchers looking at the potential of a technology and its possible problems. We're proper professional skeptics who see the shortcomings in a technology and find out how to overcome it."

While the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is the primary sponsor of research at Argonne's Transportation Technology R&D Center, staff at the center also work with other government agencies and the U.S. transportation industry to improve processes, create products and mar kets, and provide cost-effective transportation solutions that support DOE goals and meet industry's needs.

For example, Electro-Motive Diesel (EMD), formerly the Electromotive Division of General Motors Corporation, has partnered with Argonne since 1996 to research technologies that can reduce exhaust emissions from locomotive diesel engines. EMD pays for all of Argonne's research and retains the intellectual property developed under the contract.

"Electro-Motive Diesel is a case where a company has bet its future on Argonne," says Johnson. "EMD does all of its research related to emissions standards at Argonne. This is as big a validation of the quality of our work as you can get."

Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles

Argonne's outstanding expertise in advanced automotive research has been recognized by DOE's Office of Freedom CAR and Vehicle Technologies, which has desig nated Argonne as the lead national laboratory for the simulation, validation and laboratory evaluation of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and the advanced technologies they require.

A plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) is similar to the hybrid electric vehicles on the market today, but it has a larger battery that is charged both by the vehicle's gasoline engine and, when needed, by a standard 110V electrical outlet.

Cheaper, lighter, safer batteries are the critical tech nology for PHEVs, but other broad energy and environ-mental considerations also must be examined before these vehicles become widely available. For example, while a PHEV might be less costly for the consumer to drive than a gasoline-powered vehicle, the impact on the electrical grid when charging would need to be examined.

In one of the transportation group's latest collabora tions, Argonne and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) will conduct detailed analysis of PHEVs to assess the commercial feasibility of this technology for DOE.

EPRI and Argonne will evaluate PHEVs, hybrids and conventional vehicles from environmental, cost, design and marketing perspectives. The objective of the multi-year research project is to provide a balanced and authoritative study of both the advantages of and the challenges to the design and commercial production of PHEVs.

An assessment of PHEV s' potential social benefits, including reductions in imported petroleum-based fuels, enhancement of American energy security and improvement of air quality, will be key components of the study. This research is funded by DOE's Office of Freedom CAR and Vehicle Technologies.

GREET

Part of developing advanced vehicle technologies and transportation fuels is to evaluate their true impact on society. To assist these efforts, Argonne's Michael Wang has created a powerful life-cycle analysis tool that allows users to accurately evaluate the energy and environmental benefits of such transportation technologies and fuels.

The Greenhouse gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy use in Transportation (GREET) software model addresses the need for truly comparative full fuel cycle, or well-to-wheel, analyses. Developed in a user-friendly Microsoft ® Excel platform with a graphical user interface, the model is available to the public free of charge. Using GREET, researchers can calculate:

• Consumption of total energy from renewable and non-renewable sources, including petroleum only and petroleum in combination with natural gas and coal.
• Emissions of greenhouse gases—primarily carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide.
• Emissions of "criteria" pollutants—those for which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sets limits.

GREET analyses were the focus of discussions with Argonne researchers that helped persuade auto company executives that ethanol could provide a valuable fuel alternative to gasoline. The Society of Automotive Engineers recognizes GREET as the "gold standard" for well-to-wheel analyses of vehicle and fuel systems. Already, GREET has more than 4,000 users throughout North America, Europe and Asia. That number includes government agencies, the auto and energy industries, research institutes, universities and public interest groups.

PSAT

The innovative Powertrain System Analysis Toolkit (PSAT), developed by Argonne engineers Aymeric Rousseau, Phillip Sharer and Sylvain Pagerit, allows car designers to create models of different powertrains and realistically represent their characteristics. By testing these models on a computer, engineers can predict each design's fuel economy, emissions and performance, and send to production the blueprints of only the most efficient and high-performance designs.

The forward-looking toolkit was released in 2003 and licensed to industry—including Ford, DaimlerChrysler, General Motors, Exxon/Mobil and Lockheed Martin—to automotive suppliers and to universities, who use the program to develop designs for student competitions. General Motors is working with Argonne to develop a proprietary version of PSAT tailored to the company's data and designs; DOE is partially funding this cooperative R&D agreement. There are more than 300 licensed users of PSAT at 60 organizations. In 2007, PSAT won an award for Excellence in Technology Transfer from the Federal Laboratory Consortium, an organization of more than 600 federal laboratories and research centers.

Recycling

Besides building better cars for the future, Argonne researchers are developing better ways to dispose of cars when they reach the end of their lives. Americans scrap about 15 million cars and trucks annually. About 25 per cent of the material from those vehicles is not recycled.

At the end of their useful lives, most vehicles are dis mantled at facilities that recover usable parts for resale or remanufacture. The remaining hulk goes to a shredding facility for separation into ferrous and non-ferrous metals, both of which are recycled. The remaining non-metallic scrap, known as shredder residue, goes to landfills. For each ton of metal recovered by a shredding facility, roughly a quarter ton of shredder residue is produced.

To develop sustainable vehicle-recycling techniques and reduce the amount of shredder residue going into landfills, the U.S. Department of Energy has structured a cooperative research and development agreement among Argonne, the United States Council for Automotive Research's Vehicle Recycling Partnership (a partnership of DaimlerChrysler, Ford and General Motors) and the Plastics Division of the American Chemistry Council.

The project supports the demonstration of materials recovery technologies in an effort to develop a world-class, commercial-scale integrated complete residue recovery system. A pilot recycling facility at Argonne is demonstrating techniques for recycling these materials for future use.

Argonne's forward-looking pilot facility incorporates a two-stage separation process that begins with bulk sep aration of all shredder residue into the following categories:

• Fines (iron oxides, other oxides, glass and dirt),
• Polyurethane foam,
• Polymer concentrate, and
• Ferrous and non-ferrous metals.

The facility also houses a plastics separation function that recovers the major plastics from the polymer concentrate using froth flotation techniques. Once separated, raw materials from the Argonne facility will be provided to injection molders and compounders for evaluation and testing, keeping these plastics out of landfills and contributing to the development of lighter, more fuel-efficient vehicles. Argonne is negotiating with private companies to build a commercial-scale pilot plant.

Looking ahead Hillebrand says one of the reasons the transportation group has been so successful in attracting industrial partners is that companies appreciate Argonne's familiarity with how they operate, and that's no accident. "We hire a lot of people with expertise and experience in the auto and truck industries," he said. "We want to bring in people who understand the business side as well as the technology side.

"There is a transition occurring in industry," said Hillebrand. "Due to shrinking budgets, a lot of organizations are reducing, or even dropping, their research work. Some of that work is being transferred to the national labs and universities. With its unique capabilities in transportation research, Argonne is ideally suited to take on this challenge and is committed to helping industry and the United States grow and prosper."

By Donna Jones Pelkie.

For more information, please contact Dave Baurac (630/252-5584 or media@anl.gov) at Argonne.