The United States Department of Energy has awarded $151 million of grants to 37 companies, universities and research institutions through the recently formed Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.
AutoTech Daily reported that this week’s awards are for the first round of projects funded under ARPA-E, which is receiving $400 million under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
The initiative aims to support “high-risk, high-reward” energy research to find new solutions for climate change and energy security.
General Motors Co., which will receive $2.7 million to develop technology to convert waste heat from vehicle engines into electricity, was the only automaker named in the program.
Delphi Automotive Systems LLC won $6.7 million under the new DOE program to develop technology to make power delivery from batteries to electric motors 50 percent more efficient. It will work with International Rectifier and Oak Ridge National Laboratory on the project.
Michigan State University is getting $2.5 million to complete its prototype development of a new gas-fueled electricity generator to replace current backup generator technologies
in plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. Developers say the system is five times more efficient than traditional auto engines in generating electricity and is 20 percent lighter and 30 percent cheaper to manufacture.
GM's project will see the automaker working with HRL Laboratories (co-owned by GM and Boeing); Dynalloy Inc., a Tustin, Calif., manufacturer of shape memory alloys (Flexinol) specially made to be used as actuators; and the GM-University of Michigan Smart Materials Collaborative Research Lab in Ann Arbor to develop new low-hysteresis SMA materials and the prototype system.
When a stretched SMA wire is heated, it shrinks back to its pre-stretched length. As it cools, the material becomes less stiff and can revert to the original shape. The goal is to use these properties to create a heat engine capable of converting heat energy to mechanical or electrical energy. Previous SMA-based heat engines were too large and inefficient to be useful.
GM has published several technical papers about the use of SMA in applications such as latches, the environmental Web site GreenCarCongress notes. Although GM has been evaluating SMA heat engine for waste heat recovery for less than a year, it says the potential is huge. The company estimates that the technology could improve vehicle fuel economy as much as 15 percent by exploiting a temperature differential as small as 15 to 20 degrees Celsius.
As part of the program, the researchers say they need to develop a material for the particular temperature range of the application. Another key is to maintain a low hysteresis level, which has proven difficult with SMAs in the past. Still to be determined is how to cool the device. Air and liquid cooling techniques are being considered.
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