WWW.GOODNEWS.WS Riversimple Urban Car

http://goodnews.ws/

The Riversimple Urban Car is an open source hydrogen Fuel cell vehicle that will be built by Hugo Spowers' company, Riversimple. A working demonstrator vehicle was unveiled in London on 16th June 2009, and production is planned to begin by 2013

The Riversimple Urban Car was designed and developed in Great Britain by teams at Cranfield and Oxford Universities. It has been financed by Sebastian Piech , the grandson of Ferdinand Porsche.

The Urban Car is a two passenger vehicle about the size of a Smart. It weighs 772 pounds (350 kg), and is constructed of a Carbon fiber composite material body.The car can reach speeds of 50mph and travel for 240 miles (390 km) on 2.2 pounds (1.00 kg) of hydrogen before refueling. It gets the equivalent of 300 mpg in hydrogen,and its life cycle assessment carbon emissions are less then 30g CO2/km

The Urban Car is powered by a fuel cell that converts hydrogen into electricity. This power supply functions like a battery, uses no moving parts, and emits only pure water. Two novel principles involved with this project:

Decoupling acceleration and cruise demands
Decoupling acceleration and cruise means that the fuel cell will only need to be large enough to supply the power needed for maintaining a constant speed, which is about 20% of the power needed for acceleration. Most of the car's braking is done by electric motors on each wheel. These motors capture the energy of the car in motion, and store it as electricity in a bank of Electric double-layer capacitors (ultra-capacitors). This electricity is used to provide 75% of the power used in acceleration. Because of this, the Urban Car can be powered by a 6kw fuel cell, which is significantly smaller than the Honda FCX Clarity's 100kw fuel cell. This requires less hydrogen to be stored on board, and results in an overall lighter vehicle

Mass decompounding involves designing the car as a complete system, as opposed to redesigning a car originally conceived as being powered by an internal combustion engine into a fuel cell vehicle. The combination of a small fuel cell, along with elimination of the unnecessary gearbox, drive shafts, power-assist systems, and related and resulting components, results in very lightweight vehicle.

The open source design for the Riversimple Urban Car will be stored on the 40 Fires wiki site online. The wiki project is called The Hyrban. Any small manufacturer can lease the design for free, modify it as desired, and build their own version of the vehicle

Riversimple will lease the cars over 20 years instead of selling them, with fueling included in the leasing cost. This is intended to increase the life of the vehicles, and reduce materials usage.The cost of the lease is expected to be about £200 (US$330) per month.

http://goodnews.ws/
WWW.GOODNEWS.WS Riversimple Urban Car