Industry News
British LIFECar project plans to demonstrate high performance fuel cell sports car
22nd June 2005
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 first 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. 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 (note C) of the electric motors
- OSCar: Responsible for overall system design and architecture
QinetiQ: Developing Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC)
Hugo Spowers of OSCar Automotive said, “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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