Penn State EcoCAR Delivers Bi-Fuel Promise

On a campus rife with grand architecture and inspired new buildings, the work under way in a nondescript garage off Hastings Road could well help change the world.

Sounds like hyperbole, I know, but it’s no exaggeration.

It is here, on a far-east block of University Park, that the Penn State Advanced Vehicle Technologies Team labors quietly, outside the day-to-day spotlight. But the team’s EcoCAR — a GM crossover vehicle rebuilt to run on both bio-diesel and electricity — showcases pioneering ingenuity in bi-fuel vehicle development.

More than 60 Penn State students have helped overhaul the GM-supplied stock vehicle over the past couple years. Their mission, part of the national EcoCAR competition hosted by GM and the U.S. Department of Energy, is to produce a new-world car that maximizes fuel efficiency, minimizes environmental impact and retains practical appeal for car buyers.

The three-year contest among 16 North American universities is entering its final year, but already the Penn State entry has ranked among the top three. Judges in the contest’s second year ranked it highly for drive quality (It’s smoother than the factory model that it’s based on), fuel consumption (the gasoline equivalent of 57 miles a gallon) and its team’s public outreach (It has more than 300 Twitter followers).

Supported heavily by the state Department of Environmental Protection, A123Systems and the Larson Institute at Penn State, the project vehicle has cost an estimated $3 million in development expenses, including more than $100,000 for components alone, team captain Mike Zahradnik told me Friday.

He and his colleagues took the afternoon to help the public — and the media — understand their remarkable project, in understated Penn State engineering style. Their Odyssey Day event, timed to coincide with with National Energy Awareness Month, drew a respectable turnout that included State College Mayor Elizabeth Goreham and College of Engineering Dean David Wormley. A key element of a sustainable society in the future, Wormley told the group, will be energy-efficient, low-emission transportation. And Goreham, ever the green booster, highlighted the borough’s own campaign to slim its environmental impact.

‘We actually want change,’ she said, appearing to address the students especially. ‘But we need to be pushed.’

She encouraged them to keep dreaming big, to keep bringing new vision and perspective to environmental issues. ‘We need vehicles like this,’ Goreham said.

About two dozen students are working on the Penn State EcoCAR vehicle this year — two of them women — as they lighten its 4,580-pound curb weight and make it more showroom-ready for the final round of judging in 2011. For many of them, it’s nothing short of a labor of love: Project contributors include both engineering classes and individual volunteers.

Of course, whether their vision — or a version of it — will reach mass production remains to be seen. But it’s hard not to be awe-struck by their creative work. Already, their invention can travel some 300 miles without needing to stop and refuel. For the first 30 to 35 of those miles, it can run solely on electricity before a clean diesel-fueled motor switches on to recharge the batteries. That range could make the design especially suitable for a workaday commuter.

It may not be without any environmental impact, but it’d be a significant leap over the status quo. Another group at the Friday event, North Carolina-based Transtech Energy, illustrated just how practical such innovation can be. David Kennedy, a Transtech director, drove the world’s only propane-fueled Dodge Charger up to University Park for the day.

For about $7,000, he told me, Transtech will soon be able to convert a stock Charger to a bi-fuel system that can run primarily on propane. It switches over to gasoline as a backup.

By running on propane, Kennedy said, a Charger can cut is particulate-matter emissions by 70 percent. And because propane contains far less carbon than gasoline does, using propane can double the vehicle’s travel distance between oil changes and triple its engine life, he said.

Not perfect, but a dramatic leap forward, for sure.

Here’s hoping that some Penn State-bred innovation will help deliver the next one.