last
updated 7th July 05
by 4ecotips.com
 Famous
Morgan company in British partnership
LIFECar, an entirely British partnership,
has unveiled plans to develop ‘the
world’s first environmentally
clean sports car’, a Morgan
Aero Eight derivative powered by a
QinetiQ-developed fuel cell.
The partnership is made up of the
Morgan Motor Company, the privatised
former MoD technology group QinetiQ,
Cranfield and Oxford Universities,
BOC and OSCar, an enterprise established
by engineer Hugo Spowers to develop
sustainable vehicle technology.
Part-funded by the DTI, LIFECar is
a two and half-year long project.
The car's power system aims to produce
significant improvements over current
FCV prototypes, with the fuel cell
powering separate electric hub motors,
ultra-capacitors storing energy from
regenerative braking, and vehicle
architecture that will allow the car
to have a much smaller fuel cell than
is conventionally regarded as necessary:
it will only be as large as is required
to provide cruising speed, approximately
24 kW, as opposed to around 85kW proposed
by most competitor systems.
The project was unveiled at this
year's SMMT International Business
Group by Charles Morgan, corporate
strategy director of the Morgan Motor
Company and LIFECar project co-director.
Costing a total of £1.9m, with
a mix of industry and DTI funding,
the two and a half-year project will
be broken down into the following
areas of responsibility: BOC: Developing
the hydrogen refuelling plant. Cranfield
University: systems simulation, on-board
computing and control of the fuel-cell
hybrid powertrain and also responsible
for analysis of the integrated design
process used, vehicle controller and
control algorithm, together with modelling
software. Morgan Motor Company: providing
the car platform and assembling the
final concept car. Oxford University:
undertaking the design and control
of the electric motors. OSCar: Responsible
for overall system design and architecture.
And QinetiQ: Developing Proton Exchange
Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC)
Hugo Spowers of OSCar Automotive
says: “This project is the first
fruit of a great deal of work on the
whole system design of fuel cell powered
vehicles. We hope to be able to demonstrate
that the perceived barriers to the
adoption of hydrogen-fuelled motoring,
the high costs of fuel cells and hydrogen
storage are, if not bogus, much less
of a problem than is conventionally
thought.”
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