Detour for a Breakthrough Car

When DaimlerChrysler Corp. unveils its Jeep Commander concept vehicle today in advance of the Greater Los Angeles Auto Show, it will fall short of the ambitious goal set two years ago to develop a revolutionary electric vehicle with a fuel cell powered by gasoline.

The fuel-cell system in the Commander doesn’t work, although DaimlerChrysler vows it will fix the problem in a few months. The car at the L.A. show, which runs Jan. 2-10, instead is run by electric motors powered by conventional lead-acid batteries.

DaimlerChrysler wants the Commander to send the message that a huge sport-utility vehicle doesn’t have to be an enemy of the environment. After all, it is the world’s first four-wheel-drive electric vehicle.

But the Commander is also evidence that gasoline fuel cells are presenting bigger technological hurdles than first anticipated. And DaimlerChrysler, though not ready to abandon the gasoline technology, is putting it on the back burner while pursuing methanol and direct-hydrogen systems more vigorously.

“The operation was a success, but the patient died,” said Bernard Robertson, DaimlerChrysler senior vice president of engineering technologies. “Still, we learned a lot from this.”

The attraction of a gasoline-fed fuel cell is that it uses a readily available fuel that consumers are comfortable with. The lack of an alternative-fuels infrastructure is one of the major obstacles to bringing clean-burning vehicles to market.

Although environmentalists generally favor fuel cells, some are critical of the gasoline approach.

“It could be the right technology but the wrong fuel,” said Jason Mark, transportation analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Mass.

DaimlerChrysler is considered a leader in fuel-cell research and development. Before the merger of Chrysler and Daimler-Benz of Germany in the fall, the latter’s Mercedes-Benz luxury car unit had demonstrated several prototype vehicles that run on methanol-fed or direct-hydrogen fuel cells.

DaimlerChrysler has teamed with Ford Motor Co. and Ballard Power Systems of Vancouver, Canada, a leading fuel-cell maker, in an effort to mass-produce methanol fuel-cell vehicles by 2004. Other leading auto makers, most notably General Motors Corp. and Toyota Motor Co., are also developing fuel-cell vehicles.

Fuel cells are considered the best candidate to replace the internal-combustion engine in the next few decades. They create electricity (as well as water vapor as a waste product) in a chemical reaction that combines hydrogen with oxygen from the ambient air.

Supplying hydrogen to the fuel cell is a challenge because the gas is difficult to store on board. It must be contained in bulky tanks, and the gas is not readily available.

So researchers have worked to develop on-board reformers that can extract hydrogen from gasoline, methanol or other hydrocarbon fuels. The gasoline reformer used by DaimlerChrysler was developed by Arthur D. Little Inc. of Cambridge, Mass., with funding from the Energy Department. It has been successfully demonstrated in the laboratory but not yet in a running vehicle.

There are several major problems to be overcome. One is the carbon monoxide created by the partial oxidation of gasoline. Carbon monoxide poisons the fuel cell and must be eliminated.

Also, it takes about 30 minutes to bring the system up to the proper operating temperature to produce hydrogen. That means supplemental hydrogen must be stored on board or heavy electric batteries must power the vehicle initially.

Methanol fuel-cell systems also use on-board reformers. But methanol is a simpler compound than gasoline to break down. The system is less complex and the technical problems not as difficult to overcome, experts say.

Still, fuel-cell systems with reformers are bulky and expensive. They cost about $30,000 each, or about 10 times the price of a conventional engine.

“Cost is a big Achilles’ heel for the fuel cell,” said Robertson of DaimlerChrysler.

One reason the Commander was chosen to display the technology was the vehicle’s large size. About as big as a Jeep Grand Cherokee, the concept SUV has enough engine compartment space to contain most of the fuel-cell system.

That system alone weighs 2,100 pounds, or about 1,000 pounds more than a conventional internal-combustion engine. The system’s weight is offset by the use of injection-molded plastic for the body. The Commander was built of carbon fiber to simulate the weight savings that plastic can achieve.

DaimlerChrysler estimates the Commander should deliver fuel economy about 1 1/2 times that of conventional SUVs while drastically reducing emissions.

Robertson said the next step would be to integrate a methanol fuel-cell system from Mercedes’ experimental Necar 3 into the Commander by the end of 1999. The system will include supplemental battery power to improve performance and warmup times.

“We still like the idea of gasoline, but it’s pretty tough to do,” he said. “To get fuel cells out there sooner rather than later, it probably has to come with methanol rather than gasoline.”

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Catch video from the Greater Los Angeles Auto Show news conferences and print out a coupon good for $1 off admission at https://www.latimes.com/autoshow.

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* COMING THURSDAY: Highway 1, our autos section, previews the Greater Los Angeles Auto Show, with looks at new models, concept cars and other news.

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The Engine That Might

DaimlerChrysler is struggling to make its concept of a gas-run fuel cell work--and thereby bring to market a four-wheel-drive vehicle that is environmentally friendly. The fuel cell would generate its own electricity by combining oxygen from the air and hydrogen extracted from fuels such as gasoline. The concept:

* Step 1: Heat is applied to liquid gasoline, converting it to a gaseous state to ensure cleaner, soot-free combustion.

* Step 2: Vaporized fuel is combined with some air in a partial oxidation reactor, producing hydrogen and carbon monoxide.

* Step 3: Steam acts with a catalyst to convert most of the carbon monoxide into harmless carbon dioxide and additional hydrogen.

* Step 4: In the preferential oxidation stage, injected air reacts with the remaining carbon monoxide over a catalyst to produce carbon dioxide, leaving hydrogen-rich gases.

* Step 5: In the fuel-cell stack, hydrogen gas is combined with air to produce electricity to move the vehicle with virtually no pollution--emitting primarily water vapor.

Source: DaimlerChrysler