Fuel efficiency grants

Two

R&D projects have been selected to receive grants from the

(DOE) as part of an effort to improve the fuel efficiency of light-duty vehicle engines.

‘We expect this research to make significant strides toward maximising an engine’s performance in a cleaner, more economical manner,’ Secretary of Energy Samuel W. Bodman said, as he announced a series of awards totalling $21.5m nationwide for eleven cost-shared R&D projects.

Combined with industry investment, the eleven projects selected will total nearly $43m to support improvement of engine and combustion systems for the next generation of efficient vehicles.

One project, based out of Argonne's Transportation Technology R&D Center, will attempt to make flexible-fuel engines more efficient by using advanced engine technology with in-cylinder sensing technology to rapidly extract large quantities of information every time the engine ignites fuel.

This in-cylinder technology, called ionisation sensing, provides real-time data to engineers that may enable them to significantly reduce the size and improve the fuel economy of an engine without sacrificing power.