SPECIAL REPORT: Researchers work to make cars more efficient

Just inside the city limits of Greenville sits a sprawling campus of ultra-modern buildings, poised to house some of the top engineering students from nearby Clemson University.
At the new CU-ICAR (Clemson University International Center for Automotive Research), students and faculty can work alongside researchers from such prestigious Upstate companies as BMW and Michelin.
Mike Messman, a researcher at CU-ICAR, watched a machine rattle and move a Mazda crossover vehicle rather violently inside one of the chambers at the school.
Messman says his work is all about finding weak points in cars and trucks.
"We fine-tune the quietness of cars, the squeaks and rattles," he said.

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Click here for an in-depth explanation of bio-diesel.

Click here to learn more about Clemson's new CU-ICAR facility where students will begin classes in November.

Messman says those squeaks and rattles are tell-tale signs that mean the structure of the vehicle isn't sound. But keeping the car structurally sound isn't easy, especially if you're watching out to make sure the car isn't to heavy, making it less fuel-efficient.
"As we engineer lighter and lighter vehicles, we have to take structure out, but we still have to preserve the strength," Messman said.
Down the hall at CU-ICAR, Dr. Todd Hubing and his students test the efficiency of all the intricate electronic systems--the myriad of computers--inside today's cars and trucks.
The students are huddled around equipment inside a giant chamber that resembles a large, padded cell.
Hubing says the room, in essence, re-creates a perfect open field to test the signals that the computers put out, to help ward off any interference from outside signals, such as added accessories consumers put into their cars, like ham radios.
"There's a lot going on (inside the car)," said Hubing. "You really couldn't build a car now that gets 50 miles per gallon and it not have a lot of electronics and communicating."
Back on campus in Clemson, students and professors are working on ways cars and trucks can perform better with alternative sources of fuel, like bio-diesel.
According to Dr. David Bruce, a professor at Clemson, Europeans currently manufacture 10 times the amount of bio-diesel that the U.S. does every year--up to 800 million gallons.
Bruce and his students are working on new ways to produce bio-diesel, and he thinks the U.S. is still years away from a reliable, sustainable system of producing the alternative to regular gasoline and regular diesel.
"In certain diesel engines, you can take straight vegetable oil," Bruce said. "It just burns less efficiently and the pollution from it is much worse than if you convert it to bio-diesel."
So Bruce thinks if the U.S. can figure out how to produce enough of the main ingredient--a vegetable oil or by-product from a vegetable source, like soybean oil--than Americans could, conceivably, start to power their cars with it.
"(Bio-diesel) cleans the engine much better than (regular) diesel, so it's much better for the engine and it's a much cleaner fuel to burn."
(To see just how bio-diesel is produced, click on the video on this webpage. There, Bruce explains the process.)
Also on campus, mechanical engineering students say they have advanced the concept of a gas-electric hybrid engine.
Carl Eichel, a recent graduate, demonstrated how an electric bike, powered by a battery, but with the aid of an ultra-capacitor, can use more power, more quickly.
"The drawbacks to batteries is that they can be pretty heavy, and they're good at storing enough energy. They're not very good at supplying power," said Eichel. "So this is looking at making a regular electric bicycle more efficient."
By switching on the capacitor, the bicycle accelerated for up to 30 seconds on a flat, paved surface, without Eichel having to pedal.
The application to a hybrid car is this: if an ultra-capacitor could be fitted to a hybrid gas-electric motor, then the driver would use less gasoline when pulling away from a stoplight, or accelerating up a hill, thereby increasing the already superior gas mileage that makes the hybrid models so attractive to consumers lately.
"You could use less gas, or you could use the same gas and use a smaller battery, and hopefully gain some weight savings," said Eichel. "And that makes everything more efficient."
Students can begin classwork at the new CU-ICAR facility coming up in November.
Researchers like Messman, whose worked in automotive research for 15 years, say the combination of top-notch facilities and expertise from the industry mean Clemson students have a great advantage.
"I have to say all this equipment exists for engineers in industry," he said. "It's a great facility for research and training."