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Futuristic cars using an alternate fuel source make a stop in Norman.

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The Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), a non-profit organisation, was established in 1982 by resource analysts L. Hunter Lovins and Amory B. Lovins in response to the oil crisis of the late 1970s and early 1980s to examine and consult on energy policy. RMI now has around 40 full-time staff and consults to extensively to the automotive industry, amongst others.

In 1991, RMI proposed the Hypercar ultralight vehicle concept designed to maximise efficiency as a synergistic union of ultralight materials formed into an ultra-low-drag vehicle body powered by a hybrid electric drive. Separately, these design ideas have advantages and drawbacks, but by combining them together, a synergy can be created between the individual elements, which multiplies the benefits.

The need for the Hypercar to exist was based on the fact that while remarkable advances have been made in automotive technology, today's vehicles are still incredibly inefficient, using only about one percent of their fuel energy to propel the driver due to massive engine and powertrain losses through heat and friction. Just 15-20 percent of the fuel energy reaches the wheels, but due to the great mass of a modern vehicle compared to the driver, around 95 percent of this fuel energy reaching the road just moves the car, leaving one percent of the original fuel energy to move the driver. Hypercar vehicles are designed to minimise these energy losses, increasing by tenfold the fraction of the final energy that actually moves the driver.

See more about the Hypercar - its background, history and more images - after the jump.
The basic concept of a Hypercar is if you can make the body panels and structural frame out of lightweight carbon fiber composite, you reduce the weight of the vehicle substantially - which then allows you to achieve greater performance and/or efficiency. To this point, lightweight composite design has been expensive so it has only really been used as a way to increase performance in, for example, Formula 1 cars. If efficiency is your primary goal though, by reducing the weight of the car, you can reduce the size of the engine required. If you reduce the size of the engine though, that reduces the weight further allowing you to reduce the engine size even more. If the car weighs less, the brakes and other components can be smaller. And once you're trying to move around a car weighting a less than half as much, you're obviously going to use less fuel no matter what drive train technology you incorporate.

But massive fuel efficiency improvements are just one side of the coin. In a high volume environment like automobile manufacturing, improving efficiency can bring down the price a lot. If you are making a car using lightweight carbon fibre composite, the carbon fibre raw materials can be mixed, cured and pressed into shape on-site meaning you don't have to transport in heavy steel raw materials which saves on your input costs. If different pigments can be mixed in with the carbon fibre when its made, you don't have to paint your cars any more, saving you an entire paint shop. If the carbon fibre can be pressed into really complicated moulds, you need less individual pieces to make a car body, saving time in labour to deal with the hundreds of bits that make up cars today. If the pieces themselves can be carried around by hand because they're so light, you don't need cranes and heavy lifting equipment any more. If the pieces can be snapped together like Lego blocks and bonded with special glues, you don't need welding equipment any more. If the final cars are lighter, you wont use as much energy to move ship them to their final destination. And all the way along the manufacture process, from top to bottom, you can save money which effectively offsets the higher cost of using carbon fibre in the first place.

Increased safety is another by-product of vehicles manufactured with lightweight carbon fiber composites. By virtue of being stronger and stiffer than metals, advanced composites can absorb five times more energy per pound in a collision. And being lighter, advanced composite cars carry less momentum than heavier cars, making collisions less deadly to the people they hit.

Between 1991 and 1993, RMI refined and validated the Hypercar concept through peer review by scores of industry and independent experts. It was determined that a lightweight carbon fiber composite Hypercar would be four to eight times more efficient than an electric vehicle using standard sheet metal automotive construction technology.

In 1993, the concept was publicly released at the International Symposium on Automotive Technology and Automation with supporting details. After receiving the Nissan Prize, RMI organised a dedicated conference on Hypercars in 1994. Also that year, RMI founded the Hypercar Center, an additional nonprofit arm dedicated to supporting the rapid commercialisation of ultralight hybrid vehicles.

From 1994 to 1996, Hypercar Center's emphasis was on further validating the concept from design and market perspectives through computer modeling and by publishing technical papers. demonstrating that Hypercar vehicles could work, that all market requirements could be met, and that the myriad of technical challenges could be overcome.

In early 1996 the landmark technical assessment, " Hypercars: Materials, Manufacturing, and Policy Implications" was published.

By mid-1997 the Hypercar Center was engaged in discussions and collaboration with around 30 current or intending automakers

In 1999 Hypercar, Inc. was spun off as a for-profit start-up company to commercialise the Hypercar concept and to start getting them made. And by 2000, all key technologies had been demonstrated.

It was expected that well-integrated models would be expected on market in 2003-05, but I guess the dot com crash and 9/11 have both set the timeline back. There is certainly a great deal of activity in the industry towards hybrid and pure electric drive systems, but less so in the use of lighweight materials.

RMI has since morphed Hypercar, Inc into Fibreforge, which now specialise in the manufacture of incredibly lightweight structures for high volume applications. Hopefully we'll see more carbon fibre composites and other light weight materials making it into new vehicles in the next few years.

Stay tuned to AutoblogGreen for an upcoming interview with Michael Brylawski, Senior Consultant at the Rocky Mountain Institute, who co-founded the Hypercar, Inc. spin-off.

UPDATE: The in-depth interview with Brylawski starts here.

Related:
[Source: Rocky Mountain Institute]

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How long until we get one? A short history of the ultralight RMI Hypercar

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The Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), a non-profit organisation, was established in 1982 by resource analysts L. Hunter Lovins and Amory B. Lovins in response to the oil crisis of the late 1970s and early 1980s to examine and consult on energy policy.

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The following article appears in the March/April 2007 issue of Technology Review.

At MIT's Sloan Automotive Laboratory, Daniel Cohn (pictured above) stands behind an engine equipped with test instruments (in yellow) and an injection system that sprays fuel directly into the engine's combustion chambers.

For Daniel Cohn, a senior research scientist at MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center, the century-old internal-combustion engine is still a source of inspiration. As he strides past the machinery and test equipment in the MIT Sloan Automotive Laboratory, his usually reserved demeanor drops away. "An engine this size," he says, pointing out an ordinary-looking 2.4-liter midsize gasoline engine, "would be a rocket with our technology."

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By way of explaining that technology, he shows off a turbocharger that could be bolted to the 2.4-liter engine; the engine, he adds, uses direct fuel injection rather than the port injection currently found in most cars. Both turbocharging and direct injection are preëxisting technologies, and neither looks particularly impressive. Indeed, used separately, they would lead to only marginal improvements in the performance of an internal-combustion engine. But by combining them, and augmenting them with a novel way to use a small amount of ethanol, Cohn and his colleagues have created a design that they believe could triple the power of a test engine, an advance that could allow automakers to convert small engines designed for economy cars into muscular engines with more than enough power for SUVs or sports cars. By extracting better performance from smaller, more efficient engines, the technology could lead to vehicles whose fuel economy rivals that of hybrids, which use both an electric motor and a gasoline engine. And that fuel efficiency could come at a fraction of the cost.

Cohn says that his colleagues-Leslie Bromberg, a principal research scientist at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center, and John Heywood, a professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Sloan Auto Lab-considered many ways to make internal-combustion engines more efficient. "And then, after a lot of discussion, it just sort of hit us one day," Cohn recalls. The key to the MIT researchers' system, he explains, was overcoming a problem called "knock," which has severely limited efforts to increase engine torque and power.

In gas engines, a piston moves into a cylinder, compressing a mixture of air and fuel that is then ignited by a spark. The explosion forces the piston out again. One way to get more power out of an engine is to design the piston to travel farther with each stroke. The farther it travels, the more it compresses the air-fuel mixture, and the more mechanical energy it harvests from the explosion as it retreats. Overall, higher compression will lead to a more efficient engine and more power per stroke. But increasing the pressure too much causes the fuel to heat up and explode independently of the spark, leading to poorly timed ignition. That's knock, and it can damage the engine.

To avoid knock, engine designers must limit the extent to which the piston compresses the fuel and air in the cylinder. They also have to limit the use of turbocharging, in which an exhaust-driven turbine compresses the air before it enters the combustion chamber, increasing the amount of oxygen in the chamber so that more fuel can be burned per stroke. Turning on a car's turbocharger will provide an added boost when the car is accelerating or climbing hills. But too much turbocharging, like too much compression, leads to knock.

An alternative way to prevent knock is to use a fuel other than gasoline; although gasoline packs a large amount of energy into a small volume, other fuels, such as ethanol, resist knock far better. But a vehicle using ethanol gets fewer miles per gallon than one using gasoline, because its fuel has a lower energy density. Cohn and his colleagues say they've found a way to use both fuels that takes advantage of each one's strengths while avoiding its weaknesses.

The MIT researchers focused on a key property of ethanol: when it vaporizes, it has a pronounced cooling effect, much like rubbing alcohol evaporating from skin. Increased turbocharging and cylinder compression raise the temperature in the cylinder, which is why they lead to knock. But Cohn and his colleagues found that if ethanol is introduced into the combustion chamber at just the right moment through the relatively new technology of direct injection, it keeps the temperature down, preventing spontaneous combustion. Similar approaches, some of which used water to cool the cylinder, had been tried before. But the combination of direct injection and ethanol, Cohn says, had much more dramatic results.

The researchers devised a system in which gasoline would be injected into the combustion chamber by conventional means. Ethanol would be stored in its own tank or compartment and would be introduced by a separate direct-injection system. The ethanol would have to be replenished only once every few months, roughly as often as the oil is changed. A vehicle that used this approach would operate around 25 percent more efficiently than a vehicle with a conventional engine.

A turbocharger and a direct-injection system would add to the cost of an engine, as would strengthening its walls to allow for a higher level of turbocharging. The added equipment costs, however, would be partially offset by the reduced expense of manufacturing a smaller engine. In total, an engine equipped with the new technology would cost about $1,000 to $1,500 more than a conventional engine. Hybrid systems, which are expensive because they require both an internal-combustion engine and an electric motor powered by batteries, add $3,000 to $5,000 to the cost of a small to midsize vehicle-and even more to the cost of a larger vehicle.

When the MIT group first hatched its idea, Bromberg created a detailed computer model to estimate the effect of using ethanol to enable more turbocharging and cylinder compression. The model showed that the technique could greatly increase the knock-free engine's torque and horsepower. Subsequent tests by Ford have shown results consistent with the MIT computer model's predictions. And since the new system would require relatively minor modifications to existing technologies, it could be ready soon. Ethanol Boosting Systems, a company the researchers have started in Cambridge, MA, is working to commercialize the technology. Cohn says that with an aggressive development program, the design could be in production vehicles as early as 2011.

While Cohn applauds the benefits of hybrids and says his technology could be used to improve them, too, he notes that the popularity of hybrid technology is still limited by its cost. Cheaper technology will be adopted faster, he suggests, and will thus reduce gasoline consumption more rapidly. "It's a lot more useful," he says, "to have an engine that a lot of people will buy."

Kevin Bullis Senior Editor, Materials

My reporting as ... MIT Technology Review's senior editor for materials has taken me, among other places, to the oil-rich deserts of the Middle East and to China, where mountains are being carved away to build the looming cities. More

Growing up, I lived for a time in the Philippines, where I knew people who lit their tiny homes with single lantern batteries or struggled to breathe through the dense diesel fumes of Manila, so I have a feel for the pressing need around the world for both cheap energy and clean energy.

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The following article appears in the March/April 2007 issue of Technology Review. For Daniel Cohn, a senior research scientist at MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center, the ­century-­old internal-combustion engine is still a source of inspiration. As he strides past the machinery and test equipment in the MIT Sloan Automotive Laboratory, his usually reserved demeanor drops away.

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Tanya Powley brings us inside the engineering hub of the supersonic car

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Advanced engine technologies can significantly improve fuel economy. Many are on the market right now.

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Have you ever opened the hood of your car and wondered what was going on in there? A car engine can look like a big confusing jumble of metal, tubes and wires to the uninitiated.

You might want to know what's going on simply out of curiosity. Or perhaps you are buying a new car, and you hear things like "3.0 liter V-6" and " dual overhead cams" and "tuned port fuel injection." What does all of that mean?

In this article, we'll discuss the basic idea behind an engine and then go into detail about how all the pieces fit together, what can go wrong and how to increase performance.

The purpose of a gasoline car engine is to convert gasoline into motion so that your car can move. Currently the easiest way to create motion from gasoline is to burn the gasoline inside an engine. Therefore, a car engine is an internal combustion engine -- combustion takes place internally.

Two things to note:

There are different kinds of internal combustion engines. Diesel engines are one form and gas turbine engines are another. See also the articles on HEMI engines, rotary engines and two-stroke engines. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages.

There is such a thing as an external combustion engine. A steam engine in old-fashioned trains and steam boats is the best example of an external combustion engine. The fuel (coal, wood, oil, whatever) in a steam engine burns outside the engine to create steam, and the steam creates motion inside the engine. Internal combustion is a lot more efficient (takes less fuel per mile) than external combustion, plus an internal combustion engine is a lot smaller than an equivalent external combustion engine. This explains why we don't see any cars from Ford and GM using steam engines.

Let's look at the internal combustion process in more detail in the next section.

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­Have you ever opened the hood of your car and wondered what was going on in there? A car engine can look like a big confusing jumble of metal, tubes and wires to the uninitiated. You might want to know what's going on simply out of curiosity.

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1) How much of the energy stores in gasoline is lost through friction?
2) Does a car have to be heavy in order to be safe? Explain.
3) Why would it be difficult for large automakers to produce cars with carbon-fiber bodies?

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Use the videos and research site on this page to learn more information about hybrid cars.

Using complete sentences, write the answers to the focus questions in your Engineering Notebook.

Complete the Bonus Activity if you finish early.

Once all of the tasks above are completed, you may go to the Greenpower Game site.