Energy prize for hybrid engine
Lino Guzzella’s research group has won the Watt d’Or 2014 energy prize for development of a natural gas-diesel hybrid engine. The innovative combustion engine system emits up to half as much CO 2 as conventional engines and with the same performance.
The savings are impressive: a natural gas and diesel hybrid engine developed by researchers at the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control at ETH Zurich undercuts the current CO2 emission limits by a third to a half while maintaining the same performance (as reported by ETH Life). This means that the combustion engine – which operates using sophisticated control engineering – already meets the federal government’s emission regulations planned for 2025. Its equivalent fuel consumption is less than 2.4 litres per 100 km.
This high efficiency has now been rewarded by the Swiss Federal Office of Energy. The Federal Office’s external page Watt d’Or award, which is now in its eight year, selects projects and initiatives that pave the way for a sustainable and energy-efficient future. Researchers Christopher Onder, Tobias Ott, Florian Zurbriggen and Lino Guzzella, Professor of Thermotronics and Rector of ETH Zurich, won in the category “energy-efficient mobility” because they not only demonstrated a highly efficient engine but also a marketable solution.
Another success for ETH researchers
This is the third time that Guzzella’s group has won a Watt d’Or. “The three projects have a logical connection,” explains the ETH professor. In 2007, his group received the prize for the Pac Car II – a competition vehicle, so to speak, that won in energy saving and secured the group worldwide recognition, but was not practical. The researchers wanted to get closer to the market and developed the pneumatic hybrid engine (Watt d’Or 2010), which has a compressed air tank instead of a battery and thus saves up to 30-50% fuel. “This showed us that we were on the right track to finding a practical solution,” explains senior scientist Onder.
The move to the natural gas and diesel hybrid engine was a logical step for the researchers. They were looking for a powertrain technology that offers a high efficiency and could be put on the market within the next five years. The result is the natural gas-diesel hybrid engine system. Such systems already exist for stationary applications, but it is an innovation for cars with a constantly changing speed. According to the researchers, the chances are good that the concept will be adopted by car manufacturers in the next five years.