Development of a High-Efficiency Hybrid Truck Incorporating a Lean-Burn Compressed Natural-Gas Engine

摘要

As part of efforts at Mitsubishi Motors Corporation to tackle rapid increases in energy consumption and the exhaustion of the world's natural energy resources, development is currently under way of a highly-efficient hybrid truck which would present no threat to the world environment or to any of the world's plants or living creatures.rnThis paper will provide an overview of this project to develop a highly-efficient, new generation, hybrid truck. Specifically, it will detail the combination of a compressed natural-gas (CNG) engine with a hybrid electric motor system in order to achieve greater energy efficiency than possible with those conventional diesel-engine trucks which are currently predominant in load-carrying operations, in order to greatly reduce emission levels of carbon dioxide (CO_2), toxic nitrogen oxides (NOx), and particulate matter (PM) emission volumes.rnThis project has been consigned by the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) and constitutes the Mitsubishi Motors Corporation portion of the ACE Project ~ a project aimed at the development of highly-efficient, clean-energy vehicles which was initially contracted by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) to the Japanese Automobile Research Institute (JARI) and then by JARI to eight individual Japanese companies:[l][2].