Repowering the American Dream ~Neil Young's LincVolt Hybrid Visits VIR~

Famed rocker Neil Young's motor coach and car collection includes a 'series hybrid' vehicle - a 1959 Lincoln Continental convertible. Young and his team recently stopped by VIRginia International Raceway to utilize the Virginia Institute for Performance Engineering and Research's (VIPER is a Batten College institute ) chassis dyno to work on the car's generator engine.

Using VIPER's instruments to fine-tune the single-rotor Wankel engine driving the generator, the stop helped to improve the car's efficiency. Dyno staff led by Victor Seaber helped the team test the generator engine and electric motor output on the chassis dynamometer at VIPER's lab in VIR's North Paddock.

Young said that with Compressed Natural Gas (CNS) "we got 65 miles per gallon; we switched to gasoline to see what we could do with gasoline." After the engine is warmed up, "we introduce the vaporizer - the vaporizer injects hot fumes into the rotary and since the rotary doesn't go up and down, it goes around, once we get it going on vaporized gasoline fumes, we get better efficiency out of the fumes." To generate hydrogen, LincVolt uses a water-cooled electrical control box to manage the electrical demands. The engine is being tested to run on multiple fuel sources, with gasoline, CNG, plus "water gas" -- hydrogen produced via electrolysis from water carried on board.

The big pie-in-the-sky goal is to eliminate the fuel. 80% of the cost of a gallon of gas comes from distributing and refining it. The cost of making oil to work in a car is what's expensive. So if people had something they could use from home, they wouldn't have to have this distribution system."