Creating sustainable energy solutions
Transformative automotive technology
Teams of researchers at MSU are developing powerful new biofuels in tandem with specially designed engines, a distinctive integrated approach that could drive the next automotive revolution.
Transportation accounts for about two-thirds of oil consumption in the United States and about one-third of all the energy used in the country. The critical need to reduce the nation's dependence on oil imports, combined with today's use of the same efficiency-limiting combustion system that powered the first automobiles more than 100 years ago, presents a significant challenge—and opportunity.
With deeply rooted expertise in agriculture, plant science, and engineering, MSU is ideally positioned to meet that opportunity.
The university has invested in an interdisciplinary academic community that is focused on automotive research and fuels in partnership with government and industry. In addition, MSU has developed an infrastructure that supports the study of vehicle engine efficiency, alternative energy, and emission reduction, with much of the research based in the Energy and Automotive Research Laboratories—a dynamic 29,000-square-foot research complex on the MSU campus.
There—in partnership with Ford Motor Company and with support from the U.S. Department of Energy—chemical, mechanical, and electrical engineers are creating, refining, and testing fuels that are more complex and sophisticated than existing biofuels. At the same time, they are designing engines that better accommodate these next-generation fuels.
Revolutionary fuels
As a partner in the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center—one of three national centers funded by the U.S. Department of Energy—MSU is playing a leading role in transformational biofuels research. The process that could lead to large-scale use of biofuels to power automobile engines begins with MSU plant geneticists and biologists who are developing new fuels from renewable resources that can be created without disrupting or limiting food supplies.
Only about 20 percent of land in the United States contains high-quality soils that are best suited for growing food crops. That leaves a considerable amount of landmass on which nonfood crops—including those for biofuels—can be grown. One of the goals of the scientists is to determine which biofuels can be developed best from plants grown on these soils.
Chemical engineers at MSU are working on more economical and environmentally friendly ways to refine fuels made from soybean and plant oils, as well as woody stems and stalks from trees and other plants, and they’ve made breakthroughs by removing several major barriers to production.
Carl Lira and Dennis Miller, professors of chemical engineering and materials science, have developed a continuous distillation process to turn soybean oil into biodiesel—a cheaper and greener process that produces less byproduct than biodiesel produced in batches. And Ramani Narayan, University Distinguished Professor in the MSU’s Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, is working to chemically modify biodiesel’s formula to keep it from solidifying in cold temperatures, which enables the production of blends that contain a greater proportion of biodiesel. The research also has led to the creation of a biofuels processing and production company—Spartan Biofuels LLC, which was founded by Miller and Narayan.
Evolving engines
Advanced biofuel blends, which maintain greater stability than fossil fuels as temperatures rise and fall, are being tested in enhanced engines that are built specifically to accommodate those properties. These new biofuels are more sophisticated than ethanol and biodiesel, says Miller, because teaming up the chemical and mechanical sides of engineering can ward off some of the current problems with biofuels.
“By designing the engines at the same time, we believe we can optimize efficiency, performance, and environmental benefits,” says Miller, who is leading the chemical engineering side of MSU’s automotive efficiency research.
Miller’s counterpart on the mechanical engineering side of MSU’s automotive energy efficiency equation— Harold Schock, professor of mechanical engineering—is leading efforts to determine the most effective ways to use biofuels in engines. Teams of faculty and student researchers evaluate different fuels’ performance through combustion studies. For example, an optical diesel engine, which was developed with support from the Environmental Protection Agency, allows the researchers to see inside the combustion chamber to observe how the fuels are mixing and to evaluate combustion quality.
“A lot of the details of how engines perform can have a serious influence on the improvement in efficiency,” says Schock.
Teams at the Energy and Automotive Research Laboratories also are developing methods to produce lighter, stronger parts that cut manufacturing costs and increase gas mileage and ways to convert waste vehicle exhaust into electricity to increase fuel economy.
MSU is home to one of the most advanced thermoelectric power generation research groups in the world, and part of the university’s automotive research involves recovering waste heat from diesel engines that is then used to extract energy to help power the vehicle. The goal is to improve fuel economy of large trucks by 5 percent in the next few years. And automobile companies are turning to MSU’s hybrid vehicles team, which translates research conducted at the university for application to auto components to maximize the efficiency and affordability of hybrid models.
According to Schock, building better engines and using hybridization could lead to doubling energy efficiency within the next 20 years. “We need to produce devices that can maintain a high level of efficiency,” he says. “These devices and the entire system must also be cost effective, and whatever materials we use to make them have to withstand thermal stress.”
Multiple solutions and impacts
There is no single solution to the world’s looming fossil fuel shortage, and Michigan State is working on multiple approaches to finding environmentally responsible and economical ways to power transportation.
Mechanical engineering faculty members are working with Visteon Corp. and Mahle Powertrain to design advanced ethanol-fueled engines—three-cylinder engines that will have the same power output as six-cylinder engines and operate with efficiency that would make use of ethanol price competitive with gasoline. And in January, MSU unveiled work on a patented process to pretreat corn-crop waste before conversion into ethanol that will eliminate the need for adding extra nutrients and will cut the cost of producing biofuels from cellulose—fibrous material found in plant stems and wood chips.
MSU’s collaborative automotive and fuels research holds promise to reduce automobile emissions and improve the economic outlook for Michigan. “If we’re successful, many jobs will be created as the biofuel industry expands and new engine technologies are implemented,” says Miller.
And by designing engines to accommodate new fuels and new fuel properties, which Schock says can make a 20 percent to 50 percent difference in the way an engine operates, the impact is tremendous. If the technology is developed to achieve a 20 percent increase in efficiency for all U.S. transportation, the energy saved would be equivalent to increasing domestic oil output by about 50 percent.
That’s nothing short of revolutionary.
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