TECHNOLOGY UPDATE First electric buses transporting passengers Hybrid-electric buses have been ferrying fare-paying passengers throughout Manhattan since last September as part of a pilot project to test the new technology's reliability. By June, New York City Transit expects to have 10 of these buses, which expel so few pollutants that they can be considered ultralow emission vehicles, in regular service. The buses are powered by what inventor Lockheed Martin Control Systems of Johnson City, N.Y., calls a HybriDrive propulsion system. Its main innovation is a computerbased control system that incorporates a decade's worth of knowledge gleaned from perfecting engine-control algorithms for military and commercial aircraft, explained M. Denyse LeFever, manager of business development for the company's Power and Industrial Drive Systems division. The buses incorporating the HybriDrive are constructed by Orion Industries of Oriskanv N Y. The HybriDrive propulsion system also includes an engine, generator, battery system, and AC induction motor. The electric motor is what turns the wheels, explained Barb Smart, senior technical marketing representative for Lockheed Martin. The main purpose of the engine, and the generator attached to it, is to provide fuel to the battery pack, she said. Because the propulsion system requires no engine-slowing gear shifts, vehicles built around it can accelerate more quickly, stressed Tim Grewe chief engineer for Lockheed Martin's Power and Industrial Drive Systems The average time to accelerate from 0 to 50 in a conventional 20 000-lb truck is 42 seconds; when powered by a HybriDrive that time droDS to 23 seconds Grewe said More than 50% of the energy used by standard buses goes into slowing down the heavy vehicles, Grewe noted. The HybriDrive
propulsion system incorporates a feature called regenerative braking, which allows the vehicles to recharge their batteries by capturing deceleration energy that would normally be dissipated as heat. The fuel-neutral engine can run on regular or diesel gasoline, natural gas, or methanol. Tests conducted by the Canadian EPA showed that, even using diesel fuel, the vehicles built around the engine meet California's ultralow emission vehicle requirements for cars.
Regional green chemistry awards The first awards honoring commercially available products and process!s based on green chemistry were presented last November as part of an American Chemical Society regional meeting. All nominees were from businesses in 10 Southeastern states and the territory of Puerto Rico. Scientists at AlliedSignal, Petersburg, Va., received the Environmentally Significant Process Award for their method of recovering usable mjterial from waste nylon in carpeting, automobile parts, textiles, casting materials, and packaging. The process, which works only with Nylon 6 and was developed in cooperation with scientists at DSM Chemicals of North America, Augusta, Ga., results in a m;terial that CcLQ
New Yoik City Transit is testing hybrid electric buses like this one on regular bus routes. (Courtesy Lockheed Martin Control Systems)
The small fleet being amassed in N.Y.C.—the first customer for the hybrid buses—runs on diesel fuel. All of the buses in the pilot project are expected to make it through a typical 100-mile run each day while carrying passengers, said Bill Parsley, director of research and development for New York City Transit. The fact that buses tend to be very fuel efficient when they're stuck in traffic makes them particularly valuable in this gridlock-bound city, he added. The hybrid buses generally use half as much fuel as a typical bus and achieve optimal fuel efficiency when they have the most starts and stops, Smart explained. For this reason, Lockheed Martin is targeting delivery trucks as well as transit buses as markets for its propulsion system.
be used to produce hijhquality nylon "identical to the virgin material," according to Ed Duffy, collections leader. New nylon products created from the recovered material can be recycled over and over without degradation in quality he said What sets AlliedSignal's nylon recovery process apart, Duffy stressed, is that it does not require any advance materials separation. For example, the technology allows entire carpets—including the polypropylene backing and latex glue, as well as the nylon fibers—to be processe< simultaneously in a reactor vessel. The Environmentally Significant Product Award went to Albright & Wilson Americas, Richmond, Va., for developing a new class of low-cost corrosion inhibitors. Bricorr 288 is a phosphonocarboxylate mixture that controls corrosion and scale in vessels, piping, and heat exchangers of industrial cooling water systems. Initially formulated in 1990 by scientists in the company's U.K. office, the lowphosphorus product contains no heavy metals yet performs as well as chromate which was once the main corrosion inhibitor for such applications —KELLYN S. BETTS
FEB. 1, 1999/ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY/NEWS " 8 7 A
