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A University of Michigan researcher thinks we can triple the fuel economies in our petroleum-powered vehicles in the next 25 years. All we need to do is replace horsepower with brainpower.

John DeCicco, a lecturer at the School of Natural Resources and Environment at Michigan, isn't bearish on alternative fuels or electric vehicles, but he argues that the most cost-effective means of reducing carbon footprints and keeping fuel prices from swallowing us whole is an evolutionary progress in the combustion engines that already make up our transportation paradigm. That means placing efficiency above power, and adopting smarter electronic systems for our automobiles.

In a study published for The Energy Foundation, DeCicco identifies emerging trends within the automotive world that are already pushing buyers away from raw power and toward other amenities, like Bluetooth connectivity, on-board Internet, and other IT amenities that enhance the customer experience minus the big block V-8 engine.

As cars grow friendlier from a passenger standpoint, they should also grow smarter under the hood. For one, reduced engine size and overall mass is an easy way to increase efficiency - DiCecco's math says for every 10 percent reduction in weight, you get a 6.5 percent increase in fuel efficiency - but the inertial recovery of regenerative brakes on hybrids can push that efficiency higher. Add in an optimized powertrain and efficiency increases further.

Moreover, some concept cars have been experimenting with lightweight body materials like composites, increased aluminum and magnesium content, and carbon fibers that further reduce weight without reducing size, meaning we can keep our leggy sedans while still pushing up efficiency. Layer that with better aerodynamic designs, reduced tire drag, smarter transmissions, and leaner, lighter engine blocks - a real contributor to mass - and pretty soon you've got a smarter power source pushing 20 percent less weight (780 pounds for light fleet vehicles, or 30 pounds per year over the 25 year horizon).

Materials have to be safety rated, technologies proven, and - perhaps most importantly - customer appeal retained. But as DeCicco sees it, there's no reason why a persistently evolving suite of improvements can't hit an average fleet efficiency of 52 miles per gallon by 2025 and 74 miles per gallon by 2035.

Such technologies would allow the existing energy scheme to persist, albeit more efficiently, while nascent tech like biofuels and all-electric vehicles can come into their own at a reasonable pace (we also need time to upgrade our energy grids before shifting to an all-electric economy). Drivers would have to give up some of the get-up-and-go they've come to expect from generations of American muscle cars, but the savings - according to DeCicco's models - would be vast.

For more details on how we get there from here, download a PDF of DeCicco's study.

[Michigan Memorial Phoenix Energy Institute]

Speeding Downrange Barry Hathaway

We're not sure how your week was, but for a team of mechanical engineers, speed junkies, and gearheads from Ohio State it was anything but slow. This week the team took the Buckeye Bullet version 2.5, the team's battery powered, all-electric landspeed racer out to the Bonneville Salt Flats to break the electric car land speed world record, and they did exactly that, hitting a peak speed of 320 miles per hour.

The Buckeye Bullet team -- a collaboration between the Ohio State University Center for Auto Research and a handful of sponsors -- has been racing electric cars for well more than a decade, but the VBB2.5, as it's known, is their first landspeed racer that runs purely on battery power. Last year their hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered VBB2 set a world record for fuel cell-propelled land vehicles by running a mile at an average speed of 302.877 miles per hour (the two-way average was a slightly lower 300.992 miles per hour).

Click to launch the photo gallery

VBB2.5 aimed to set the same kind of speed to beat in the all-electric category. Powered by batteries provided by sponsor A123, VBB2.5 logged an average mile speed of 291 miles per hour. But VBB2.5 wasn't done. The very next day driver Roger Schroer throttled VBB2.5 to a peak speed of 320 miles per hour, logging a two-way average mile speed of 307.66 miles per hour.

The record still needs FIA certification before it's official, but consider the bar set -- it blew past the previous record for an EV by more than 60 miles per hour. But perhaps the most exciting wrinkle in the Buckeye Bullet story is the fact the VBB2.5 is only a test-bed for the team's battery technology. VBB3 -- a sleek black rocket of a landspeed racer that the team plans to build on top of the experience gained from VBB2.5 -- is expected to break all previous records in the not too distant future.

[Buckeye Bullet Blog, Buckeye Bullet]

How To Find a Dirty Bomb: As muons pass through the top and bottom detectors, their path builds a view of suspicious objects. Graham Murdoch

Smuggling a nuclear weapon into the U.S. is distressingly simple-all someone needs is a truck full of watermelons. Regulations prohibit using high-power x-rays on perishables, and Geiger counters don't beep alerts because the juicy fruit absorbs radiation. But a new drive-through detector takes advantage of cosmic rays to locate any nuclear material, no matter how cleverly hidden.

Only a few percent of the 15 million or so cargo containers that enter the country every year are screened for nukes, a number that Congress mandates must be 100 percent by 2012. That benchmark is impractical using today's tech, however. Standard detectors can miss nuclear material hidden behind lead or steel, and naturally radioactive cargo such as kitty litter gives false positives, requiring a labor-intensive hand-search.

A new detector from Decision Sciences, a security company in California, sees through anything and can scan a semi in less than a minute. It tracks muons, cosmic particles constantly bombarding Earth. Muons penetrate everything but are deflected more by heavy atoms such as uranium and plutonium. The detector tracks these deflections.

The company finished lab tests this spring and is now building detectors to deploy at several ports in the next year. "As long as it works quickly enough, it should fit the bill," says Robert Dynes, a physicist at the University of California at San Diego who reviewed radiation detectors for Homeland Security. Tests indicate that the device should be speedy on real cargo, says Decision Sciences's chief technology officer, Allan Wegner. And it's nearly foolproof. Wegner can't go into detail about its weaknesses (for obvious reasons), but he assures us that kitty litter and watermelons will no longer threaten national security.

How It Works

As muons come from the sky, they pass through the top detector, the truck and the bottom detector. The muons create ionization trails in the scanner's gas-filled detector tubes, which sensors record.
Heavy atoms, such as uranium and plutonium, deflect muons more than lighter ones do. If the angles of muons' entrance and exit paths vary by a wide magin, nuclear material could be present.
The detector also senses gamma radiation, which the computer combines with muon data to build a 3D view of suspicious muon-scattering objects, alerting customs agents exactly where to search.

You may not have heard about it during your local traffic report this weekend, but anyone negotiating the Beijing-Tibet expressway in recent days is painfully aware of the problem: a 62-mile jam that slowed traffic to a crawl between the Chinese capital and Jining city. But while such huge traffic jams aren't unheard of, China's traffic woes are unique in their duration - the current traffic snarl (it's still ongoing) has been unfolding since August 14, making for nine days of gridlock.

While initial reactions to that news might range from awe to genuine pity for the commuters stuck in that mess, the jam also highlights massive opportunity for the Chinese. While Detroit declines, China is quickly becoming the world's largest auto economy. China is selling passenger cars to its own citizens at a pace that seems unfathomable during an overall global economic decline (last year China automotive market moved 13.6 million cars, compared with 10.4 million in the U.S.). China is also on the brink of becoming a major automotive exporter, meaning Chinese manufacturers and designers will soon be deciding what commuters drive in other parts of the world.

But while China has also laid down massive amounts of pavement to accommodate that growing market (along with more than 100 airport projects around the country and ever-faster, ever-expanding rail infrastructure), the country can't keep up with the pace of traffic, periodically allowing the amount of cars to overwhelm the freeway system. The current traffic jam follows similar snarls in June and July and was caused by a spike in cargo truck traffic heading into Beijing. Maintenance work (repairing damage caused by the increased cargo traffic) compounded the problem, and until that project is finished next month the gridlock is expected to continue. The point being, China can keep adding highway lanes but the Chinese are already purchasing the cars with which to fill them.

These are the kinds of problems that can lead to innovative solutions, making China a promising test bed not just for automotive technologies but groundbreaking new transit platforms and fresh thinking in city planning. Planning happens to be China's strong suit, and lacking those annoying regulatory hurdles that might hinder grand visions in other nations the country has the ability to drastically reorganize itself via truly big infrastructure projects.

China is not afraid to gamble either; when we wrote about the "straddling bus" earlier this month, it looked like one of those half-cocked schemes that are technically dazzling but outside the realm of practical application. Yet China has already mapped out 116 miles of Beijing roadway to test the experimental 1,200-passenger electric buses, with infrastructure upgrades beginning by year's end.

This month's (and presumably next month's) traffic jam is a prescient reminder that what works in other countries doesn't necessarily work in China, and its cash-flush, hands-on approach to urban planning and technology development (sometimes seen as anathema to more laissez-faire Western principles) will likely lead to envelope-pushing new blueprints for the high-density cities of the future. Whether it's the automobile itself that undergoes radical transformation or the infrastructure that serves it (or more likely both) remains to be seen, but given its current trajectory the Chinese market is set to redefine automobile transit for the coming decades.

[AFP via PhysOrg]

Fuel From the Air? Scientists have learned an enzyme found in soybeans can convert carbon monoxide into propane. via Flickr/ brew127CC licensed

An enzyme found in soybeans could turn an ingredient in vehicle exhaust into new usable fuel, according to a new study. It's a major step on the path toward making fuel out of thin air.

Scientists were working with a microbe called Azotobacter vinelandii, which is found around the roots of various food plants. It creates an enzyme called vanadium nitrogenase, which produces ammonia from nitrogen.

In a study published in the journal Science, researchers took away the nitrogen and fed it carbon monoxide instead. The enzyme started making short carbon chains, two or three atoms long -- in other words, propane, which fuels the blue flames of camping grills across America.

Markus Ribbe, a scientist at the University of California-Irvine, says in a new paper that the enzyme could be further tweaked to make longer carbon chains than those that make up propane. Ribbe thinks he can modify it enough to produce gasoline, Discovery News reports.

If it's perfected, the technique could lead to cars partially powered by their own fumes or by the air around them.

Scientists who were not involved in the research hailed it as a profound discovery, according to Discovery News. Much more work needs to be done, however. Ribbe says it's very difficult to extract the enzyme, and it has only recently become possible to produce it in large quantities.

[Discovery News]

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