Seattle Times, Business:
Tuesday, October 25, 1994
A Driving Force In Cars' Future -- Wwu Pioneer Combines Solar, Fossil-Fuel Energy
Bill Dietrich
Engineering: When Detroit looks for innovation, one of the people called is Michael Seal, head of the vehicle-research program at Western Washington University. Seal's latest efforts center on hybrid solar-gas cars, including an innovative power-supply design for the next generation of his cars.
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BELLINGHAM - Ever since California demanded that the auto industry sell some zero-pollution vehicles by 1998, car manufacturers have held out the promise of an electric car like a tantalizing toy.
General Motors, for example, has been exhibiting its Impact prototype around the nation to a generally gee-whiz reception among automotive columnists.
But Michael Seal, Washington's internationally known experimental-car guru, doubts you'll ever drive one. "The reason they're showing it all around the country is to make people aware GM builds the best electric car - and to say, `Look how bad it is,' " he said. "America's auto industry does not want to build an electric car."
Costly and short-ranged - Seal said a midwinter electric-car limit of 30 miles on a single charge is closer to the truth than the 70 to 90 miles often promised - the cars will remain a tough sell.
No one is more enthusiastic about the potential of electric, solar and alternative-fuel cars than Seal, director of the Vehicle Research Institute at Western Washington University. He has been a design pioneer for the past quarter-century.
His campus garage has turned out solar and methane cars, squeezed 116 miles per gallon out of a diesel engine and won enough design awards to turn his office wall silver and gold.
Not bad for a Canadian citizen - he moved to Bellingham in 1969 - at a school with no engineering department, where he must generate all the car-making financing and uses his wife, Eileen, as an unpaid assistant.
Automobile Magazine said his lab "may well be the best automobile-design school in the world."
Seal and his students have come up with a car that can parallel-park in a space just 10 inches longer than the auto body, designed another that left test dummies undamaged in a 43 mph crash and - years before Detroit caught on - led the way on passive seat belts, aerodynamic design, lightweight composites and superefficient engines. His team developed a prototype engine adapted by Subaru for its Legacy sedan and designed a manifold used by Chrysler.
An education professor rather than an engineer, the rumpled, friendly Seal is a hands-on mechanic who started building hot rods in high school. He drives a 1965 Corvette, a 1969 Lotus and Viking 7, a high-performance sports car that accelerates to 60 mph in 5.3 seconds and gets 50 miles to the gallon.
So why isn't Seal sold on Detroit's efforts on electric cars?
Engineers have yet to get around the fact that it takes a thousand pounds of standard lead-acid batteries to store energy equal to that in a gallon of gasoline, he explained.
And what about directly tapping the sun? After all, the weird Viking 20, shaped like a torpedo with a solar-cell table on top, raced across Australia and California.
It won't work yet for a normal car, Seal explained. Sunlight delivers so little energy in a small area that you can plaster a standard car with solar cells, sit it in summer sunshine for 10 hours and gain enough power for only an hour of driving.
Nor can electric cars that exhaust their batteries be refueled from a can. It doesn't take much imagination to picture miscalculating drivers blocking the Evergreen Point bridge at rush hour, looking for a tow truck or an extension cord two miles long.
As a result, Seal predicts that what ordinary drivers in California will ultimately want is not a pure electric vehicle but a hybrid that combines the efficiency and cleanliness of electric motors with the stored energy of fossil fuels.
The designer has his cadre of about 35 students hard at work on three successive vehicles he hopes will point the way to this automotive evolution. And the latest, brightest idea takes advantage of "star wars" technology invented at Boeing.
Louis Fraas, a former Boeing Co. engineer who adapted a high-efficiency solar cell for a new kind of motor, has founded JX Crystals of Issaquah and joined forces with Seal to rethink car engines.
To understand what Seal and Fraas are up to, consider the two cars that will precede the revolutionary model they hope to unveil three years from now.
The first experiment is Viking 23, the latest in a long lineage of Seal cars and the most sophisticated yet in combining technologies.
Made of composites that make it weigh 1,600 pounds, about 1,000 pounds less than a compact, Viking 23 is so sleek that rubber gaskets inflate to fill its door seals, leaving the body absolutely flush and eliminating the tiny waves of turbulence that plague the raciest of cars.
It rolls down the road on carbon-fiber wheels that each have two tires: an inner one pumped to the 80-pound pressure of a racing bicycle to lower rolling resistance and the outer one inflated to 35 pounds for traction when cornering. The outer tire touches pavement only when the car turns.
The hood and roof are covered with solar cells that feed a high-efficiency electric motor, supplemented by nickel-cadmium batteries that are more efficient but more costly than the lead-acid type.
The rear is occupied by an internal-combustion engine to supplement the electric motor. Its preferred fuel is natural gas.
Viking 23 gets the equivalent of 200 miles to the gallon in electric mode, and its backup engine gives it a range of 300 miles, seemingly providing the best of both worlds. But its interior is spartan and looks about as comfortable as a dentist's chair. It cost $260,000 to hand-build with student labor.
Which brings us to experiment No. 2.
Chrysler wants a hybrid electric-gas car for the real world. To get one it has given 12 Dodge Neons to 12 universities, including Western. The challenge: outfit them with a low-emission electric hybrid without changing the Neon's looks, interior or instrumentation, and deliver it to the test track by next May.
Seal's orange Neon, dubbed Viking 25, wouldn't even lose trunk space after its redesign: Its new sophistication would be hidden. The driver would simply turn the key, and the car would decide when to operate on batteries and when on natural gas, making the optimum switch while moving.
An electric motor with an efficiency of 95 percent - most ordinary gas engines are so inefficient they use only about 10 percent of the potential energy in a gallon of gas - would share space with the regular engine under the hood. The combustion engine would be converted to use natural gas, which produces far less pollution and runs at about half the cost, per mile, of gasoline.
The two systems could operate at the same time, boosting power, or the gas engine could take over for exhausted batteries and recharge the pack. The range should be about 230 miles. Seal still has to find $24,000 to buy the electric motor.
"I think we have an opportunity to win this contest outright," Seal said. "And I think Chrysler will build the winning entry."
Still, an electric hybrid is an expensive and complex meshing of two power plants. Chrysler has warned it may tack a surcharge on California-bound gasoline cars to subsidize expensive electric vehicles there.
Ultimately, Seal would like something simpler and thinks he may have found it in an innocuous-looking canister that sits on his lab bench.
His daughter, Lisa, dubbed it Midnight Sun. It is solar power that relies not on our star, 93 million miles away, but on a man-made heat source powered by natural gas just an inch from solar cells, a "sun" that can be turned on and off at will.
Fraas came up with the basic idea while working on Boeing ideas to power space-based missile-destroying lasers. The device mounts fingernail-size solar cells, the world's most efficient, around a cylindrical chamber. Natural gas burns inside the chamber.
The infrared energy generated by heat of up to 2,000 degrees Kelvin is converted by the solar cells into electricity that can run a high-efficiency motor or charge batteries.
The steady burning of the natural gas instead of the on-off explosions of a gasoline internal-combustion engine produce less pollution. The contaminants that remain - mostly a family of nitrous and nitric oxides dubbed Nox - are catalyzed into the air's normal nitrogen and oxygen by a plating of rubidium, cutting tailpipe pollution by more than 99 percent.
As proposed, the high-efficiency car would cruise on only 27 horsepower but draw on bursts of 50 more from its batteries for quick acceleration. Three times as efficient as standard gasoline engines, the car should produce the equivalent of 100 miles per gallon in a real-world production vehicle.
The constantly burning generator would recharge batteries at stoplights or after a trip ended. Its design would eliminate the need to plug in the vehicle.
Quiet, clean, efficient: The promise has won Seal an $890,000 Energy Department grant and Fraas a $75,000 grant to complete research.
The pair also hope the Defense Department may soon provide an additional $3 million to explore Midnight Sun's other potential: to provide small, portable generators as heaters for remote cabins, camp stoves, electronic-equipment power sources and the like.
Such financing is a far cry from the days of Viking 1, when a boxy Toyota that had been crushed in shipping was given to Western in 1972.. Seal came up with a car that won third in a national urban-car-design contest.
Now, while Detroit and Japan experiment with battery-stuffed electrics, Seal and Fraas hope to leapfrog them. "I think we're leading in an exciting new field," Seal said.
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Solar power from a can
The Midnight Sun generator powers an electric motor by converting natural gas into electricity. This method is more efficient and produces less pollution than a gasoline-powered engine.
How Midnight Sun works
1. Inside the generator's infrared emitter, natural gas is combined with air. The gas is ignited and burned up to 2,000 kelvin. 2. The infrared emitter gives off invisible light (photons). 3. Mirrors direct the invisible light to tiny solar cells, mounted one inch from the cylinder. 4. The solar cells convert the light into electricity at the atomic level. The electricity travels out of direct-current power terminals to run an electric motor or recharge batteries.
Source: Western Washington University
Reported by Karen Kerchelick / Seattle Times
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Bo Hok Cline / Seattle Times
Copyright (c) 1994 Seattle Times Company, All Rights Reserved.
