Vehicular pollution is responsible for causing a lot of damage to the environment and the poisonous gases emitted are responsible for a number of deadly diseases. But reducing the number of vehicles on the road is an uphill task so shifting the focus on green alternative to fuels like diesel and petrol seems a sensible choice. More and more researches are being conducted to discover effective alternative fuels for automobiles.
A hydrogen powered zero emission car has been designed recently by the University of Waterloo Alternative Fuels Team (UWAFT). This design was launched at the Student Design Center at the University of Waterloo. This particular car designed by UWAFT will be showcased at the EcoCAR challenge. The EcoCar challenge is a three-year collegiate advanced vehicle technology engineering competition, in which many universities of North America participate. The students of the UWAFT are the first team ever to design a car that is powered by a hydrogen fuel cell. The challenge that this particular team faced was that of converting an automobile donated by General Motors, into a green environment friendly vehicle while maintaining or improving its performance, safety features and its consumer appeal.
The students worked for three years on this project and were helped by a number of sponsors. For instance, high voltage battery cables were provided by IEWC, and Dana Thermal Group provided custom cooling plates that were needed for their battery modules and also prototype radiators for their fuel cell system. The team collaborated with Hematite, which is a plastic car parts manufacturing company in Ontario and Braskem, to integrate some light-weight plastic parts into their newly designed vehicle.
There were only two teams in the EcoCar challenge who used electricity and stored hydrogen as its power source. The team from Waterloo was one of these two teams. The other teams chose alternative fuels like biodiesel, ethanol or electric batteries as their source of green power.
Via: ept
