2003 EETD News #17, Vol. 5, No. 2
Table of Contents

An Update on the EETD Research Program on Batteries for Advanced Transportation Technologies

The demand for so-called hybrid-electric vehicles (HEVs), which are powered by a battery and combustion engine (or fuel cell) working in tandem, has surged during the past few years. Automakers are responding to this demand by offering more and more models with hybrid power sources. This is good news from both the environmental and energy points of view because HEVs have fewer exhaust emissions and better fuel economy than equivalent vehicles powered only by combustion engines.
 

Improved Algorithms Lead to Lab-Scale Combustion Simulations

In spite of the fundamental technological importance of basic combustion processes, our knowledge of them is surprisingly incomplete. Theoretical combustion science is unable to represent realistic flames in all of their complexity, and laboratory measurements are difficult to interpret and often limited in the type of flame and level of detail they can address. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Computational Research Division (CRD) Center for Computational Sciences and Engineering (CCSE) has teamed with the Environmental Energy Technologies Division (EETD) to build a high-performance computing solution to flame simulation and analysis. This solution allows detailed three- dimensional representation of flame behavior over time, which could not previously be studied using simulation technology. This new capability sets the stage for dramatic progress in combustion science research.
 

To Get to Mars, Use Wheat

Sometime in the future, in a spacecraft en route to Mars, an astronaut may reach into a container and grab a handful of wheat straw. She'll be holding the key to a sustainable mission, the substance that will convert her incinerated waste into fertilizer for the plants she eats and nitrogen for the air she breathes during her three-year round trip.
 

Carbonaceous Aerosols and Climate Change: How Researchers Proved Black Carbon is a Significant Force in the Atmosphere

They can absorb light or scatter it. They are present in the atmosphere because of the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels. Now they are thought to have a significant effect on global warming. But until just 10 or 15 years ago, the scientific community did not accept that carbonaceous aerosol particles were common in the atmosphere. That they accept this idea now is thanks to the work of a research group, led by Tihomir Novakov at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), which has been studying these particles since the 1970s.
 

Research Highlights
 

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