SAMPE Journal - March/April 2013 - (Page 28)

Perspectives Steven Rodgers SAMPE Past President and Consultant, EmergenTek LLC Steven.R@EmergenTek.com I’ll Second That E(V)Motion “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes.” – Marcel Proust, “La Prisonnière” Sometimes leveraging technology to meet a need is not about looking for the big, splashy, newest thing. Sometimes it is about looking at the problem critically and finding a reasonable solution. Sometimes we seek a cutting edge solution and sometimes it is one that has been in use but has been unrecognized, underutilized or unappreciated. A few weeks ago I was invited to attend the 2nd annual “Energy Development Summit” to be held in our state. It was a major event, drawing an audience of 1,300 people from 22 states and 5 countries. There were representatives from the major energy utilities seated with technology entrepreneurs of every size and shape. There were panel sessions, breakout sessions, panelists and keynote speakers. In the midst of all the activity I was drawn to a bus displayed in the back of the hall. At first the bus seemed to be nondescript; a shuttle capable of hauling 16 seated people along its route. The more I looked at it the more attractive it became. The attraction was the way it performed its mission. The bus was the work of Utah State University (USU). USU is located in northern Utah in the city of Logan. Logan is a city with a population of fewer than 50,000 people and is located in Cache Valley. When you understand Cache Valley the vehicle story becomes interesting. Cache Valley is in a rural county and is comprised largely of dairy farms. The altitude of the valley is 1,380 meters/4,500 feet and the mountains that surround it are more than twice that tall. In the winter Cache Valley is plagued by temperature inversions in which high altitude warm air settles on top of the cold air in the valley and holds it in like the lid on a kettle. During such an inversion Cache Valley can experience some of the worst accumulations of pollutants in the nation. So when the need arose for a new transit system, USU began to look at electric vehicles. Of course, there are a lot of options to consider: Trains with third rails, busses with catenary lines overhead and battery-powered vehicles are all viable considerations. However, when looking at the impact on infrastructure, battery-powered buses are the easiest to implement. But there is a problem: A battery sufficient to power a shuttle bus for an entire day is big and heavy. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to expend a significant percentage of the total battery power to simply haul the battery around. On top of that, the time to properly charge the battery might be sufficient to limit the number of hours the bus can spend in service. So USU turned to a concept that has been used in Genoa, Italy and Turin, Italy for more than a decade: Inductive charging on the fly. The battery is reduced in size to about 15% of the 28 SAMPE Journal, Volume 49, No. 2, March/April 2013

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of SAMPE Journal - March/April 2013

SAMPE Journal - March/April 2013
Table of Contents
President’s Message
Technical Director’s Corner
Chemical Reactivation of Exterior Decorative Aerospace Topcoats
Materials & Products
Welcome SAMPE’s Newest Members
SAMPE Journal Editorial Calender
Corporate Partners
Experimental-Comparative Investigation of the Effects of Various Process Parameters on Drilling CFRP
SAMPE Proceedings
Perspectives
Europe News & Views
SAMPE Europe’s SEICO 2013, Paris, France
SAMPE Europe’s SETEC 13 Wuppertal, Germany
Machining and Drilling of Carbon Fiber Reinforced Plastic (CFRP) Composites
The SAMPE Foundation
Industry News
SAMPE 2013|Long Beach
SAMPE Tech 2013|Wichita, KS Call for Papers
Advertiser’s Index
Resource Center
SAMPE Membership Application
SAMPE Books & CD’s Order Form
Industry Events Calendar
Chapter Contacts

SAMPE Journal - March/April 2013