This is a text version of the Vehicle Technologies Office Overview at the 2017 Annual Merit Review, which took place June 5 - 9, 2017. The full video is on the Annual Merit Review page.
Reuben Sarkar:
Now I'd like to introduce Michael Berube, who is the director of our Vehicle Technologies Office. The Vehicle Technologies Office supports research funding for hybrid drivetrains, advanced batteries, lightweight materials, advanced combustion and fuels, as well as our Energy Efficient Mobility Systems program and Clean Cities deployment activities.
Michael brings more than 25 years of experience in the automotive industry to his post at EERE, specifically in the areas of environmental compliance, energy and safety policy, product development, and marketing. He has worked on a broad range of electric vehicle, connected car, and advanced powertrain initiatives.
And he's also led a number of environmental and energy initiatives within Chrysler and now FCA Corporation. And so Michael's going to give us some more insights into our vehicle program, our recent accomplishments, as well as our future plans. So please join me in welcoming Michael.
[Audience applause]
Michael Berube:
Thank you. Well good afternoon, everyone. For those – I see we've got a number of people standing. If people want some seats, I see a bunch of empty seats over here. Please feel free to grab those. It's going to be hard to follow up after the great comments and insights we got from Jon and Joe, but Sunita and I will do our best here to do so.
So as Reuben said, my name is Michael Berube. I'm the director for the Vehicle Technologies Office. I've had a chance to meet a number of you over the past year since I joined the Department of Energy and VTO. But for many, this is the first time that we've been able to meet.
So let me – I'd like to take a few minutes, I guess, now really to share a little bit about myself, let you know what's new with the Vehicle Technologies Office, help explain our vision for this year and our strategy going forward, as well as share a little bit about the goals that we've had and the successes that I've seen over this past year that really have made me so confident about what we can achieve.
So just to let you know a little bit about myself. I'm a 25-year veteran of the transportation industry, if you will, and transportation issues. My background is mostly at MIT and at Chrysler. I'm a civil engineer by training. I've worked on large transportation projects in several different cities. My first automotive projects, I'd have to go back a little ways, were actually an M85 vehicle, Chrysler's first flex fuel vehicle. That's M as in a methanol vehicle, to date that a little bit. Or the TE van, for those who remember the first electric minivans, so that goes back a little ways.
I spent time in product development and product planning and even a few years working in marketing on some fun products from Alfa Romeo. But my passion, and what has really led me to take on this role at VTO and to work with the great team of folks at the office there, is really how do we find ways to utilize technology and innovation to help improve transportation to make people's lives better?
So let me just tell you a little bit about some organizational changes we've had this past year. David Howell has been appointed deputy director at VTO and helps me run the R&D portfolio. Steve Goguen – I don't know if Steve's out there somewhere, but after 30 plus years, he retired. And as a result of that, we've merged together the advanced combustion engine and fuels area under one organization. We've also formed EEMS, the Energy Efficient Mobility Systems, called EEMS. Because you know in government, everything's gotta have an acronym. We formally stood that up as one group within the department.
You may ask, where's vehicle systems? Well the work that was contained within vehicle systems is alive and well. We've chosen to have it live within its particular area, whether it be the electrification area, in the EEMS area, or in analysis or advanced combustion. Now, in a few minutes, Dave Anderson will give a little bit more of a talk about the new EEMS area. But let me just take a moment, I guess, to share with you why we felt it was important enough to stand up as its own group.
There are truly dramatic shifts that were talked about earlier that are happening in the transportation sector. These shifts are being driven by technological changes, by new business models, and by consumers' willingness to accept both of those and utilize both of those. The goals of the EEMS function is really to help generate the knowledge and the innovations that could help answer some basic questions.
Like, how can we utilize this disruption to lead to new energy efficiency opportunities? What are the most promising innovation levers? And what are the risks to energy use and how can we overcome them from these changes in mobility? Now while many people are studying and talking about changes in mobility, the EEMS team within VTO is squarely focused on the issue of how can we use this as an opportunity for a game changer for improved energy efficiency?
Being new to VTO, I think it's important that you hear from me on how we articulate our vision for the office and what makes it tick. When I think about transportation – really Daniel touched on this a little bit earlier – transportation is fundamental to our quality of life and our economy. Much as it has been a driver over the last 3,000 years really, to the development of civilization.
Each year in this country, vehicles transport 11 billion tons of freight. They help move people 3 trillion miles. That's just in one year. As our economy grows, which we surely want it to grow, so will the energy needs for that. Our role at VTO is to discover the innovations that can meet those needs and help do so in a way that's low cost, secure, domestic, efficient, and clean.
We ultimately need those energy technologies to help transport the people and goods across America. This year we will focus very much on early stage research, ranging from passenger cars through to heavy duty trucks and the mobility systems in which they operate. Our work will support fuel diversification, looking at a broad range of fuels. Certainly vehicle energy efficiency and R&D, as I mentioned, the mobility systems. We will continue to have a portfolio approach. We will continue to work on advanced combustion and fuels areas, new and innovative battery technology and extreme fast charging technologies, lightweight structures, as well as new materials for advanced propulsion systems.
In fiscal year '18, our budget request of $82 million reflects this broad and diverse portfolio. It helps create the EEMS area as a specific subprogram. It provides the required support for a range of statutory items, including the Alternative Fuels Data Center and fueleconomy.gov. This year we will certainly continue to utilize the world class national labs, many of which, all of which, I think, are represented here today, and the capabilities they bring.
We'll utilize a number of consortia that go across the labs and also bring industry participation in. And although we will have less FOAs this year, there still will be some, and we'll still certainly maintain an extremely strong interaction with industry through our partnerships, through U.S. DRIVE, 21st Century Truck, and USABC. And look for new ways to partner between DOE, national labs, university, and industry. And this is going to be critical, because we still have extremely aggressive goals.
We have a vision that we can improve fuel economy by 35 percent in vehicles. And then an additional 15 percent on top of that by co-optimizing engines and fuels together. We see a pathway in the future where we can have electric vehicles with 300 hundred miles of range and they can be recharged in 15 minutes or less. And ultimately have batteries and the technology that make their cost fully competitive with internal combustion engines.
We see a future where heavy duty trucks can break thermal efficiency, achieving 55 percent and at an economical level. As well as reducing vehicle glider weight by 25 percent. Now, you may ask, why am I confident that we can achieve these goals? It's because of the work that I've seen from all of you in this room over this past year.
As I mentioned, I've been out traveling across the national labs, to a number of universities, and many companies. And over this past year, I have seen a tremendous amount of innovation. Just this last year, the team at Argonne and Oak Ridge have used their X-ray and neutron imaging and tomography technology to visualize inside a fuel injector.
Now we had some sense of that before, but never to this precise level. This type of work will allow us to create dramatically better computational fluid dynamic models that someday could be the key to achieving those types of fuel economy improvements I mentioned.
At Stanford this past year, they developed a graphene-based host for lithium metal. Now, lithium metal anodes are probably considered the Holy Grail in battery technology. If we can make this work to help manage dendrite growth, we can get to battery technology and cost levels that I mentioned before.
Out at NREL, I was just amazed as they were reviewing with us their capability now to be able to look at what electric vehicle charging needs will be in the future. They can literally take millions of actual consumer trips, real trips that they've driven, over a period of a year, and look at what are the electric vehicle recharging needs that people would have to have, how much of each charging type to meet those needs. And based on some of the early results I’ve seen, it's actually very interesting. It may not be completely what people expect. I look forward to seeing more of that published.
Another great example, I thought, this past year over at Argonne, a simple but powerful tool – in the past, to measure RON and MON, right, you'd take a big engine, you'd load the fuel in it, you'd listen for the knock. Well now we have the capability to computationally derive that knock level to measure RON and MON fuel capabilities. That allows us to significantly speed up our research in new fuels.
The team this past year at Oak Ridge National Lab, working with the University of Manitoba and McGill, working on materials, they were able to determine that hydrogen is penetrating microns into magnesium in just four hours of exposure at room temperature. Now microns may not sound like much, but when you're managing at the atomic level, that is absolutely huge. This was never known before. This is the type of new knowledge that will allow us to help manage things like hydrogen embrittlement and the corrosion, and allow materials like magnesium to become much more effective in vehicles.
Over at Oak Ridge, working with the University of Virginia and New Jersey Institute of Technology, they developed this past year a math-based algorithm approach to be able to look at how vehicles communicate with each other. And using that math-based approach and just the controls on the vehicles themselves, they were able to demonstrate, not only could the vehicles manage very complex things like an intersection or weave, but that by doing that, they could reduce the consumption in that mode by up to 60 percent fuel used. That's dramatic.
Now, I've touched on just a few technologies in our R&D area. But it's important that we remember that ultimately these technologies are used by people. I'd be remiss if I did not acknowledge the team of folks that are here today and this past year that have helped us understand these technologies in use and how individuals use them, how businesses use them, and provide important feedback to us for the research.
So, I guess, in conclusion, I'd like to just leave you with four points. Four things I talk about whenever I tell people about our office.
First, that we very much work in a portfolio approach. That we have a portfolio of technologies and we see it's critically important. We don't know which of these technologies will make the biggest improvement, which of those goals we'll achieve, but we believe by working across all of them, we can be the most successful.
Second, partnerships are key. That is why today is so important. Partnerships with industry, with university, with the national labs, is how we will achieve the goals.
Third, that we have ambitious goals. We have a vision of where we can go in the future and we believe it's critically important that we maintain those ambitious goals and that we all collectively commit ourselves to them.
And fourth, I would just like to call out – I think that the team of folks, the Vehicle Technologies Office that I work with, the team at the national labs, all of the PIs working on projects, are just absolutely first-class. And ultimately, it is people that make this work. It is people that generate the innovations. It is people that generate the new knowledge.
That's why it's critically important that each of you, I think, remain absolutely dedicated to this work. So I'd like to offer my thanks to all of you for your dedication and support. With that, I'd like to hand it over to Reuben to introduce Sunita.
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