(from Morgan Motor Company Press
Release) A wholly British partnership today unveiled plans
to develop the world’s first environmentally clean sports car,
powered by a fuel cell which converts hydrogen into electricity.
The partnership is made up of legendary British sports car
manufacturer, the Morgan Motor Company, QinetiQ, Cranfield and
Oxford Universities, BOC and OSCar.
The new vehicle, known as LIFECar, will be ultra quiet and its
exhaust systems will produce only water vapour. It promises a clean
vehicle combined with sound motoring performance and stylish good
looks.
Part-funded by the Department for Trade and Industry (DTI), LIFECar
is a two and half-year long project which marks a step change in
vehicle power technology, producing a combination of performance,
range and fuel economy that will be essential to the motoring world
of the future.
LIFECar will be based on the Morgan Aero Eight, and is powered by a
QinetiQ-made fuel cell, which converts hydrogen – and oxygen taken
from the air around it – into electrical energy. It will be clean,
quiet and economic, and the only waste product from the car will be
water. The car's power system will be incredibly efficient,
producing significant improvements over current fuel cell prototype
vehicles, with the fuel cell powering four separate electric motors,
one at each drive wheel.
The key to delivering this step change in energy efficiency lies in
a combination of factors, including weight reduction and a different
design approach. This approach exploits opportunities across the
vehicle to reduce energy losses and requirements.
Regenerative braking and surplus energy will be used to charge
ultra-capacitors, which will release their energy when the car is
accelerating. This architecture will allow the car to have a much
smaller fuel cell than is conventionally regarded as necessary: it
will only be as large as is required to provide cruising speed,
approximately 24 kW, as opposed to around 85kW proposed by most
competitor systems.
Speaking at this year's Society of Motor Manufacturers International
Business Group, where the plans were unveiled, Charles Morgan,
corporate strategy director of the Morgan Motor Company and LIFECar
project director, said: "This is a project which captures the
imagination. LIFECar promises to combine advanced technology while
retaining the best in traditional ways of designing and building
cars. A sports car that is beautiful, brilliant to drive but
pollution free must be a goal worth striving for."
Costing a total of £1.9m, with a mix of industry and DTI funding,
the two and half year project will be broken down into the following
areas of responsibility:
BOC Developing the
hydrogen refuelling plant
Cranfield University Systems
simulation, on-board computing and control of the fuel-cell
hybrid powertrain. Also responsible for analysis of the
integrated design process used.
Vehicle controller and control algorithm, together with
modelling software
Morgan Motor Company
Providing the car platform and assembling the final concept car
Oxford University
Undertaking the design and control (note C) of the electric
motors
OSCar Responsible for
overall system design and architecture
The car's fuel cell system operates
by electrochemically combining on-board hydrogen with oxygen taken
from the air outside. Although in most respects fuel cells are more
like engines than batteries, to the extent that they generate energy
from fuel in a tank rather than store energy, like batteries, they
use electrodes (solid electrical conductors) with an electrolyte (an
electrically conductive medium). When the hydrogen molecules come
into contact with the negative electrodes, the molecules split into
protons and electrons. The protons are then carried across the
proton exchange membrane to the positive electrode of the fuel cell
whilst the electrons travel around the external circuit as
electricity. The molecules of the hydrogen and oxygen are combined
chemically, with water as the only waste product. The only emission
from the QinetiQ fuel cell will be water vapour. The electric power
generated by the fuel cells powers the electric motors and turns the
wheels of the vehicle.
LIFECar Consortium - Quotations
Stephen Evans,
Professor of Life Cycle Engineering, Cranfield University:
“Cranfield University is developing computer simulation models for
the main vehicle components; such as the fuel cell, the hydrogen
storage system and the electrical machine. These models will allow
University engineers to predict the performance of the vehicle and
its environmental impact long before any physical components have
been manufactured and tested. These models will then be used to
develop the sophisticated control software and electronics, which
are necessary to integrate and manage the vehicle’s on-board
hydrogen and electrical power systems. Cranfield University will
also be acting as ‘project observer’ to ensure that the design
techniques used are made known to others.”
Dave Wardle, European Manager of Hydrogen Energy for BOC:
“The future of the hydrogen economy, and hydrogen-powered motoring
in particular, is central to both our society and our company. This
project has our total support, since if offers a real chance of
bringing forward a time in which hydrogen fuel is a realistic option
for motorists.”
Dr Malcolm McCulloch of Oxford University:
“It is obvious that in our transition to a sustainable society we
will have to adopt electric power for cars, and they will have to be
very efficient ones at that. To do this we will need to push the
envelope in the design of electric motors and their control gear,
which will be Oxford’s contribution to LIFECar.”
Hugo Spowers of OSCar Automotive:
“This project is the first fruit of a great deal of work on the
whole system design of fuel cell powered vehicles. We hope to be
able to demonstrate that the perceived barriers to the adoption of
hydrogen-fuelled motoring, the high costs of fuel cells and hydrogen
storage are, if not bogus, much less of a problem than is
conventionally thought.”
Ian Whiting of QinetiQ:
"LIFECar is about catching the first big wave in the energy
revolution, which is set to transform the motoring industry in the
same way that the computer industry was transformed by the personal
computer decades ago.”
