Seventh-place finisher, the University of Waterloo, which took top honors in the competition’s first year, encountered the most daunting task—building a dedicated hydrogen fuel cell for its primary propulsion source. The result was a vehicle with zero emissions from the tailpipe. “I was very impressed with the guys from Waterloo doing a full fuel cell because they took off on a technology that really is in rapid development,” Bly says. “They had to implement a system that is not widely available, and they had to engineer a lot of redundancies and safety measures because of the hydrogen on board. They really bit off a ton.”

Three teams—Pennsylvania State University, Texas Tech University and the University of Tulsa—used hydrogen as a supplementary or secondary propulsion source. The Penn State team injected hydrogen into their vehicle’s diesel engine as an emissions abatement strategy. Texas Tech and Tulsa used hydrogen to power auxiliary systems for their vehicles. The University of California was the only team that used plug-in hybrid technology for an energy source in their Challenge X vehicle.

The University of Michigan team developed a hydraulic hybrid, which stores pressurized fluid in large tanks from which the vehicle can extract or store energy much like an electric hybrid battery stores energy recovered from regenerative braking— a mechanism that reduces vehicle speed by converting some of its kinetic energy into electrical energy. This electrical energy can then be stored for future power demand.

Ohio State and last year’s winner, Virginia Tech, used belt alternator/starter technology for an electric performance assist while West Virginia and the University of Akron used ultra-capacitors—electrochemical capacitors that possess high-energy density commonly used in hybrid vehicles—to source high levels of power for short periods of time and still recapture energy from braking. “From a pure refinement point-of-view, I was very impressed with how the teams did with their diesel implementation with the hybrid because they were able to really do a lot of control execution to make it a very pleasing ride,” Bly says.

The Future Looks Bright
With results of the third year Challenge X competition in the books, the focus will be directed at preparing for the final event of the competition. In the fourth and final installment of the Challenge X series next year, students will focus on customer acceptability, over-the-road reliability and durability of their advanced propulsion systems with real-world evaluation outside of the laboratory. While some students will remain on the teams, others will take what they learned during the competition and advance their careers in the automotive industry, which will benefit GM and other automotive manufacturers. “I’ve seen the results of what happens with these students and it’s huge,” Jehlik says. “The payoff is almost incalculable.”

The students who used biodiesel in the competition now know that it is a viable fuel that increases fuel economy and lowers emissions levels. They could go on to establish their unique automotive biodiesel technologies in the automobile industry. “The engineering students that are working on these competitions are absolutely the same students that are going to become the engineers and the program managers for the future technology,” Prebo says. “They’re learning about diesel engines, hybrid engines and biodiesel now and they’re going to take that into their respective employers and really be champions for those technologies. I think that’s a real win for biodiesel.”

For more information on the Challenge X, visit www.challengex.org.

Bryan Sims is a Biodiesel Magazine staff writer. Reach him at bsims@bbibiofuels.com or (701) 746-8385.

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