Week 10 - The Conclusion

      This week we concluded our project by submitting our official report and presenting our findings to our peers.  We feel confident that we were able to accomplish what we had set out to do at the beginning of this assignment by coming to the conclusions that we have laid out.  For us, this project has gone beyond what we expect most of our peers have achieved with their own projects because we were taken out of our comfort zone.  Typically, as engineering students, we do not expect to be asked to look at the state of an engineering field, in this case the automotive industry, and make educated and unbiased suggestions about how it is doing.  Our research has shown us that ideas may often be good, but may not always represent the solution to the problem.  From our conclusions, we decided that electric vehicles should be the focus of the industry as it pursues cleaner methods of transportation.

     GREET has aided us greatly in our research, but the truth about it is, once we no longer have a need for studies and models like it, we will have accomplished our mission.  As a tool, GREET has provided us with the information that we need to take this argument beyond hearsay, to a intelligent conversation of what the systems are doing today, and how they are changing in the near future.  The focus of future regulation in the automotive industry should be to pressure the production of cleaner systems until the eventual takeover of the full electric vehicles.  Regulation is not a word that many people want to hear, but in all truth, without federal regulation, the industry will continue to thrive on half-baked solutions to lower operational emissions and energy consumption without ever actually removing them from the equation.

     In conclusion, as Drexel University Engineers, we are suggesting that while electric cars are not the ideal system at the moment, the majority of development should be focused on this mode of transportation.  In addition to further development of electric cars, a continued effort should be made to generate electricity with alternatives to the coal fire plants still in use from the previous century.  Utilization of hybrid systems will reduce the impact while in transition, with the intention of slowly purging these systems as the industry yields to zero emission, electric cars.  Also, rather then taking two paths to create energy, by utilizing the electric grid, we can focus more on the single solution to the issue releasing the majority of emissions: Energy Generation.

Thank you for taking the time to consider our proposal, and we hope that it will help to show more people the truth behind the green-car revolution.

Week 9

This week we discussed our concerns and objectives to conclude this assignment.  For the presentation, Bryan will be responsible for the introduction, Erik will discuss the fuel systems and GREET, and Dan will be presenting SEC, the results, and the conclusions.  By using only three of our group members to present, we hope to more effectively present the material without changing presenters as often.  Tiancheng and Ross will be performing other operations during the presentation to aid with advancement, Q&A, and logistics.    Over the next week, the presenters will be modifying their slides to better suit their style of presentation.  Dan will be finishing the paper.

Week 8

This week in class, we discussed the layout of the final presentation.  It was decided that three of the group members will be presenting the presentation in order to streamline the process.  The final paper will be constructed over the next two weeks, outlining and concluding our findings.  Prof. Spatari has asked that the paper be written as though it were a letter to the President of the U.S., advising him of our findings.  Dan and Bryan will be writing the final report.  Erik will continue maintaining the website, and will be adding a page overviewing the GREET models.  Finally, Ross and Tiancheng will be creating handouts and preparing the generic presentation.

Week 7

In this weeks lab, we discussed our findings and continued planning our conclusion of this project.  From Ross and Steven's presentation outline, we worked out what parts of the project would be represented in both the final report and the presentation for week 10.  With our objectives in order, we then assigned tasks to be accomplished over the next week which will aid in the generation of both components.  Dan will assume the role of editor in chief of the blog, meaning he is responsible for the content, formatting, and editing. Bryan will be editing the Fuel Systems page, and be assisting in writing additional content. Eric will be developing a page which will give an in-depth explanation of the GREET model. Ross and Steven will be continuing work on the presentation, adding in figures and diagrams which will be discussed.

Week 6

This week we worked more on the application of the SEC calculator on data from GREET. We also decided that it would be prudent to expand our coverage to include a larger range of years.  In addition to the 2010 data, we will also be investigating 2007, 2013, 2016, and 2019.  With these additional SEC results, an extrapolation will be created in order to establish the trends that each of these fuel sources are following.  This extrapolation will give a much more influential basis with which to justify the creation of SEC.  Our hope is to be able to present SEC as a legitimate scale to use in the analysis and comparison of any fuel system, and with these additional data points, the scale should gain rapport with it's critics.

Finally, we allocated tasks to move us toward the completion of our data, graphs, charts, write ups and presentation. Dan is responsible for tabulating the results of the SEC and projecting outputs up until the year 2019. Bryan is responsible for writing up the Fuel Systems page and finalizing it. Eric is responsible for gathering data from GREET and assisting Dan in the finalization of the SEC data. Ross and Steven will both be working on calculating the costs of implementing the alternative systems, and outlining the presentation for week 10.

Week 5 Recap

          This week we gathered and put our GREET numbers to use. The numbers that we collected were utilized in a vehicle emission scale which we created.  The purpose of the scale is to score each fuel system on it's emissions, so that we may compare them to each other.  The score of each system is calculated from the volume of each compound that the system emits over it's life cycle.  The compounds themselves are ranked on a 1-30 scale, which considers the IDLH concentration (Immediately Dangerous to Life and Health), environmental impact, and flammability/reactivity of each component. From this ranking of the compounds, we can easily distinguish which are the worst, and weigh their measurements more heavily in our emissions scale. 

          This week we focused on testing our scale, the "System Emissions Calculator", on our control, gasoline. Our calculator considers the emissions generated during fuel rendering, fuel transportation, vehicle construction, vehicle transportation, and the actual use of the system.  We have not completed the analysis yet, but the score that we generate for gasoline will be the base line for our calculator results.  This means that the other systems will need to surpass this score in order to be a better choice than gasoline.  As we move into the next couple of weeks, more information will be provided on the blog about our calculator.

Assignments:

• Dan, Bryan, Erik will be meeting this weekend to finish the gasoline calculation and generate values for the other systems using the System Emissions Calculator (SEC).
• Ross and Tiancheng will be gather pricing information for the various types of refueling stations required to operate our systems.

Week 4 Recap

                This week in our meeting we began to compile data which we acquired from the GREET 1 model.   Looking at the data given, we came to the conclusion that it might be necessary to come up with some sort of grading system for the various fuel sources.  The reason we are looking into developing this, is because we have no measure of which data points carry the most weight, and should be treated as larger contributors to the overall “score” of a fuel.  As an example, a full electric car has practically no CO₂ emissions when compared with a gasoline-powered car, but expends considerably more energy during the production of its “fuel”.  Our grading system will need to compare the significance of the various data points in order to properly weigh them against one another.

                So having gotten this far into the data, we expect to be posting our findings to the blog very soon.  The task of generating our grading system is now one of the deliverables for the coming weeks as well.  The method of our grading system shall be made available with the results.  In order to better prepare our data, we will also be starting to layout our final presentation, which should help us develop charts and tables from our data.

Assignments:

• Bryan and Eric will be working on the development of our data through the grading system.

• Tiancheng and Ross will be starting our final presentation to help us understand what we need to make our data more presentable.

• Dan will be continuing construction on the blog.  Consolidating pages, and editing.