Tibor G. Balogh PHSC 170 THE HYBRID ELECTRIC CAR The automobile is undoubtedly the source of much progress in the 20th century. Many of our freedoms that we take for granted today come from the fact that we own cars and we are free to drive them where ever we want to. With those freedoms comes a small price to pay, mainly environmental pollution and depletion of a natural resource that we need to fuel our cars with. Oil has been the engine of progress that fueled the development of western countries. While we are always searching for a new and better energy source we must still spend time and energy to reinvent the way we use existing technologies to our advantage. This paper is about how to use existing technology for the purpose of designing a more efficient car. In this paper I will write about the hybrid car. I will expose the theory of the hybrid car in a simple straight forward way. Just about every car on the road today (Feb-1995) is a traditional car where a gasoline driven motor is converting chemical energy stored in gasoline into mechanical energy of motion and torque. Since the 1970s oil embargo our cars became much more efficient. Back then the average car's gas mileage was 17 miles per gallon, today it is 27 mpg. This is perty good progress, a move to more efficient cars that use less energy. We use less gasoline today to do the same work. Much of our energy savings comes from the fact that new cars are lighter and they are computer controlled for greater energy efficiency. New transmissions, new fuel injectors and new engines are all precise and more efficient than the similar engines on older cars. We come a long way in 25 years but we can still do better than this. A hybrid car is a car that runs on both electricity and gasoline. The idea is to use electricity because it is cleaner (no pollution) and much more efficient than gasoline. Electric cars do not need heavy drivelines or heavy engine blocks or transmissions or heavy differential axles to run. Electric cars are much lighter than regular gasoline cars and that alone is much more efficient since you don't have to accelerate as much weight. Installing four electric motors, one on each wheel is the only drive mechanism for the electric car. The power source comes from state of the art (very efficient) bateries and a small 18 horse power state of the art gasoline engine that turns a generator which recharges the bateries automaticaly as needed. HOW THE CAR WORKS Most of the energy used in an automobile is used when it is accelerating. For example if you drive around town in stop and go traffic all day you would use much more gasoline than if you were simply driving on the open highway at a constant speed. Acceleration accounts for the largest ammount of energy that a car uses. Once a car is accelerated to a desirable speed then it is only using energy to overcome wind resistance, the rolling resistance of tires and the roling resistance of the gears or driveline in the car. In an electric car you could save alot of energy just by the fact that you don't need a transmission, a driveline or an engine block. In an electric car it is very efficient to simply mount the electric motors directly to the wheels of the automobile. Therefore the electric car accelerates much easyer since it is lighter. When braking in a traditional car all the energy of the forward momentum is lost to heat energy at the brakes and is dissipated into the atmophere. In an electric car you can use this forward momentum to drive the electric motors at the wheels and generate electricity that could be stored in the batteries untill needed again later. A small state of the art gasoline motor would be needed to run a generator that turns on and off buy itself when the charge in the batteries go low. The car would run primarily on electricity and there would be provisions for the car to be charged at home by simply pluging it into the 110 volts ac. The electric car would get the power it needs for acceleration from the onboard batteries and as they run low then the small gasoline engine kicks in automaticaly to charge them back up again. This is the only part of the car that would produce any pollution at all. The small engine would be tuned to its optimum revolutions per minute (rpm) so that the power level would be maximized and the pollution would be minimized. The engine and everything else in the car would be syncronized by an onboard computer. The reason why a small 18 horse power state of the art engine would be enough for a car like this is because once you accelerated to 60 or 70 mph on the open road you don't need that much energy to stay at these speeds. Even if you drain the batteries all the way then 18 hp worth of elecricity is enough to overcome the wind resistance and rolling resistance in this car and you could still be going fast. If you design a car that has a very good aerodynamic body and if the car is light because you don't include a heavy engine block or transmission then you will have plenty of power to go even much faster then the 55 mph speed limit of the road. Another advantage of electric motors is that you get maximum power and torque as soon as you apply the accelerator pedal. In gasoline engines you don't get the best performance untill you reach the optimum revolutions per minute. When you are stuck on a freeway in stop and go traffic or in a worst case traffic jam, like those common on Los Angeles freeways, then the traditional gasoline engine is waisting gas idleing. Your electric car would not waste any energy idleing because it does not need to idle. If the electric car is not in motion then it is not using energy regardeless wheather the car is on or off. REFERENCES Diem, R. William "California Positively Charged For EVs." Automotive News 05 Dec. 1994, p8(1). Diems, R. William "Automakers charge ahead with two plug designs for EVs." Automotive News 12 Sep. 1994, p4(1). Gates, Max "Acid Test." Automotive News 05 Dec. 1994, p1(2). Glanz, James "Lithium Battery Takes to Water -- And Maybe the Road." Science 20 May. 1994, p1084(1). Keebler, Jack "Congress subjects include EVs." Automotive News 24 Oct. 1994, p3(2). Keebler, Jack "Patriot fuels Chrysler's hybrid r&d." Automotive News 14 Feb. 1994, p27(1). Keebler, Jack "Focus shifts from electric to hybrid." Automotive News 17 Jan. 1994, p3(2). Pease, Bob "What's All This Electric Car Stuff, Anyhow?" Electronic Design 08 Agu. 1994, p107(2). Reichtin, Mark "Honda unveils EV test cars." Automotive News 24 Oct. 1994, p8(1). Wouck, Victor "Hybrids are ready today." IEEE Spectrum Dec. 1993, p16(2).