A zinc-air battery and flywheel zero emission vehicle
In response to the 1990 Clean Air Act, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) developed a compliance plan known as the Low Emission Vehicle Program. An integral part of that program was a sales mandate to the top seven automobile manufacturers requiring the percentage of Zero Emission Vehicles (ZEVs) sold in California to be 2% in 1998, 5% in 2001 and 10% by 2003. Currently available ZEV technology will probably not meet customer demand for range and moderate cost. A potential option to meet the CARB mandate is to use two Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) technologies, namely, zinc-air refuelable batteries (ZARBs) and electromechanical batteries (EMBs, i. e., flywheels) to develop a ZEV with a 384 kilometer (240 mile) urban range. This vehicle uses a 40 kW, 70 kWh ZARB for energy storage combined with a 102 kW, 0.5 kWh EMB for power peaking. These technologies are sufficiently near-term and cost-effective to plausibly be in production by the 1999-2001 time frame for stationary and initial vehicular applications. Unlike many other ZEVs currently being developed by industry, our proposed ZEV has range, acceleration, and size consistent with larger conventional passenger vehicles available today. Our life-cycle cost projections for this technology are lower than for Pb-acid battery ZEVs. We have used our Hybrid Vehicle Evaluation Code (HVEC) to simulate the performance of the vehicle and to size the various components. The use of conservative subsystem performance parameters and the resulting vehicle performance are discussed in detail.
- Research Organization:
- Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE, Washington, DC (United States)
- DOE Contract Number:
- W-7405-ENG-48
- OSTI ID:
- 207450
- Report Number(s):
- UCRL-JC-121727; CONF-951160-1; ON: DE96003167
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: 7. annual NESEA sustainable transportation and solar and electric vehicle symposium, Providence, RI (United States), 13-15 Nov 1995; Other Information: PBD: 3 Oct 1995
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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