As modern culture and technology continue to develop, the growing presence of global warming and irreversible climate change draws increasing amounts of concern from the world's population. It has only been recently, when modern society has actually taken notice of these changes and decided that something needs to change if the global warming process is to be stopped.
Countries around the world are working to drastically reduce CO2 emissions as well as other harmful environmental pollutants. Amongst the most notable producers of these pollutants are automobiles, which are almost exclusively powered by internal combustion engines and spew out unhealthy emissions.
According to various reports, cars and trucks are responsible for almost 25% of CO2 emission and other major transportation methods account for another 12%. With immense quantities of cars on the road today, pure combustion engines are quickly becoming a target of global warming blame. One potential alternative to the world's dependence on standard combustion engine vehicles are hybrid cars. Cost-effectiveness is also an important factor contributing to the development of an environment friendly transportation sector.
Hybrid Vehicle
A hybrid vehicle combines any type of two power (energy) sources. Possible combinations include diesel/electric, gasoline/fly wheel, and fuel cell (FC)/battery. Typically, one energy source is storage, and the other is conversion of a fuel to energy. In the majority of modern hybrids, cars are powered by a combination of traditional gasoline power and the addition of an electric motor.
However, hybrid still use the petroleum based engine while driving so they are not completely clean, just cleaner than petroleum only cars. This enables hybrid cars to have the potential to segue into new technologies that rely strictly on alternate fuel sources.
The design of such vehicles requires, among other developments, improvements in power train systems, fuel processing, and power conversion technologies. Opportunities for utilizing various fuels for vehicle propulsion, with an emphasis on synthetic fuels (e.g., hydrogen, biodiesel, bioethanol, dimethylether, ammonia, etc.) as well as electricity via electrical batteries, have been analyzed over the last decade.
In order to analyze environment impact of vehicle propulsion and fueling system; we are presenting a case study which has been reported in literature (Chapter: Ibrahim Dincer, Marc A. Rosen and Calin Zamfirescu,” Economic and Environmental Comparison of Conventional and Alternative Vehicle Options”, Book: Electric and Hybrid Vehicles: Power Sources, Models, Sustainability, Infrastructure and the Market by Gianfranco Pistoia (2010) )