The Research Angle: Developing Technology Solutions to Save Energy and Reduce Pollution
What began as a student design project for the 2002 Clean Snowmobile Competition is now a promising new technology that is restoring clean air in the Philippine cities of Manila, Cebu and Vigan. About 84% of this country's population is dependent on tricycles powered by two-stroke engines for their transportation. There are over 1.3 million tricycles in use in the Philippines, and the pollution from just one of these two-stroke engines is equivalent to 30-50 modern catalyst-equipped, fuel-injected automobiles.
When faculty adviser Bryan Willson and members of the 2002 snowmobile team learned that the technologies resulting from their research could help underdeveloped countries with pollution problems, they jumped at the opportunity. Envirofit International Ltd. was established jointly as a private, nonprofit corporation by the Colleges of Engineering and Business to develop and disseminates the technologies around the world. Willson, director of the Engines and Energy Conversion Laboratory (EECL), and Paul Hudnut, director of Venture Development, worked with former students Tim Bauer and Nathan Lorenz to develop the Envirofit business plan.
As a result of the research conducted in the EECL on a new type of direct-injection system, fuel and oil consumption in two-strokes are reduced by 35% and 50% respectively, carbon monoxide emissions are reduced by up to 85% and hydrocarbon emissions by 90%. Envirofit licenses the core of the direct injection system from Orbital Corporation, adapting the existing technology fro retrofit application to address the largest transport sector in the world: hyper-polluting vehicles with two-stroke engines. Orbital has been developing the patented OCP (Orbital Combustion Process) for over 20 years, and their system is used by a variety of commercial and recreational market products. The end result is that Envirofit has developed a production-proven, reliable and purpose-built product.
Envirofit has retrofitted and successfully tested engines in the Philippines, where particulate emissions in the four largest cities result in more than 2,000 premature deaths, 9,000 cases of severe respiratory illness and more than $430 million of economic losses every year, according to World Bank estimates. The company was honored as one of 25 Tech Museum Award Laureates from around the world in 2005, and in 2006 was named in the Stanford Social Innovation Review as one of 10 innovative technology companies that create global social change.
Extensive field testing has been done, and now the first real-world direct-injection retrofit test on a fleet of vehicles is scheduled for fall 2006, with production in Vigan expected to increase from 35 to 100-200 vehicles per month.