I was waxing in first person to an associate at work about the amazing way Yamaha and Honda have miniaturized complicated automotive emissions control systems design for cars, trucks, and SUV's, into small low mass versions for use on single, dual, and four cylinder motorcycle engines to reduce exhaust emissions of toxic air pollutants and poisonous combustion chemical byproducts that are emitted by engines that burn gasoline or diesel as particulate matter, hydrocarbon fumes, particles, soot, oxides of nitrogen and sulfur that make acid rain, and other trace pollutants that are toxic to public health plus abundant amounts of CO2 that are making climate change worse faster, since a tipping point can be reached that causes a sudden global ice age or huge change in global weather and climate with profound warming, droughts, fires and destroyed agriculture, causing food supply shortages and food price spikes worse than even the darkest days of Covid19 supply chain shortages.
Our 2013 Honda PCX-150 Scooter
Fuel injected, liquid cooled, with ACG combined alternator starter, EGR, crank case vapor pumped into intake manifold to mix with fuel and air to be burned off cleanly, and sensor based ECU control the optimized power output while also reducing harmful emissions. That's amazing to fit all that tech into a motor scooter with a tiny 153cc single engine and CVT enclosed belt drive + hub gears to enable twist and go acceleration, an huge undersea storage container.
Motorcycle Leather Cooling
My coworker Rick knowing that I know a lot about applied science & technology asks me at work potluck party the other day, "Hey Aaron, how can we design a portable AC system to cool me off when I am riding with my black leathers in peak summer weather in stop and go traffic jams so I can avoid overheating or getting heat stroke?' We discussed several possible technical solutions to move heat using flexible tubing weaved into his underclothes or long underwear, the way NASA did with the spacesuits and the backpack with all the support equipment, but DIY low budget style.
Vapor compression of refrigerant gases in a dual look system with salt water circulating through the body cooling tubing was one option, but very power or energy intensive for the motorcycles battery alternator system, and complicate, bulkier, and with many failure points, and correspondingly expensive given the short term seasonal use case especially. I slept on it and remembered a cooling solution with ICE or frozen water cubes, salt and isopropyl alcohol, thats use in an ICE Cream BALL device, such that you put the cream, sugar, add in's, flavors, or ice-cream mix into a inner stainless steel thin wall container with silicon gasket lid that screws on, such that you then insert this sealed container with the ice cream mix into a blue plastic ball assembly, then close the lock in door and open the filler port on the ball, adding ice cubes, salt and alcohol, that creates a freezing point depression mixture that starts to cool the ice-cream mix. The ball filler port then closed and you and a friend toss the ball back and forth for 30 minutes as the ice cream is chilled by the sub-freezing alcohol ice salt mix, then when you remove the container with the ice-cream mix and open it, fresh soft serve ice-cream made on the fly produced that creamy and flavorful without weird ingredients since you made it with a few simple and possibly organic ingredients at home :)
Adapting this idea to an insulated container cooling loop system on a motorcycle, means a simple 12v coolant pump, a simple insulated large water bottle, before going for a long summer hot ride, you add ice salt and alcohol to the insulated bottle. Inside the bottle a copper coil in line with the distilled water cooling loop body cooling tubing and 12v pump, then moves heat from the body to the water in the tubes when gets pumped to the copper coil suspended in the freezing mix, to chill the water by taking the heat and transferring it to the ice salt alcohol mix. This system can then be reset with the addition of more ice salt and alcohol. Alternatively a CO2 cartridge system can be added that expansion cools the cooling loop in a dry insulated container by blowing compressed CO2 from a paintball gun CO2 tank into the cooling coil where the expansion of CO2 cools the coil sucking away heat from the body cooling tube loop system, venting the CO2 to the atmosphere, such that a new tank can reset it by refilling the CO2 tank to 500 PSI then letting it cool off, or by carrying a few tanks.
2020 Yamaha MT-3 Example
Fuel injected liquid cooled offset twin based on R3 motor, with PAIR or pressurized air injected catalytic converter stainless steel blacked out exhaust system of only 18.5 lbs, that has an O2 sensor feeding exhaust gas temperature voltage reading to the ECU for air fuel mix control to light up the ceramic catalytic core of the catalytic converter during cold start with a occellating mix from rich to lean in order to flood the ceramic honeycomb with HC or hydrocarbon vapor fume then lean burn hot to burn it off which get the catalytic metals in the catalytic converter up to 1000C where they break down toxic exhaust gas components into non-toxic gases to reduce pollution emitted in the tailpipe output by 95%. The pressurized air injection helps to further clean up emissions. EGR system cools the combustion to reduce NOX, while crank case vapor recovery and fuel tank vapor recovery are injected into the engines intake to further reduce vapor emissions or pollutants that exit the crank case as vapors and gas tank as vapors, in canisters that trap the fume and release them back into the air intake of the engine to be cleanly burned off in the emissions controlled engine. Further exhaust emission controls are achieve with special engine mapping with dynamic 3D ECU maps that have variable control of the spark plug spark duration and timing, injector time and duration, and other aspects of engine control. Most of this technology exists as miniaturized systems originally designed to reduce car, truck and SUV emissions.
Reducing Vehicle Mass, Fuel Use & Emissions
Weight reduction or mass reduction + aerodynamic drag reduction and powertrain efficiency friction reduction or improved motor control electronics or better engine management + hybrid and plug in hybrid ways to mix batteries, electric motors and ICE or internal combustion engines, for gasoline hybrid electric or diesel hybrid electric propulsion in scooters, motorcycles, cars, trucks, SUV's, ships, aircraft and more. Any significant aerodynamic drag reducing technology slashes energy or fuel use, dramatically reducing the negative harm that the vehicle use imposes on the environment in terms of operating emissions. Effective vehicle scrapping where most of the vehicles materials are 99% recycled into new materials for other vehicles or other manufacturing use to make other things, means we can radically reduce the negative environmental footprint of private vehicle use worldwide. Improved exhaust emissions controls, vapor emissions controls, and emissions reducing technologies applied can further reduce toxic or poisonous tailpipe emissions.
For example, the school bus I drive professionally has a DPF or large diesel particulate filter and DEF or diesel exhaust fluid injection enhanced catalytic converter 3-way emissions reducing system that slashes toxic emissions from the BlueBird bus by 99%, but this system of emissions controls on the bus cost over $30,000. On a motorcycle such a system must cost less than $500, so aggressively optimizing emissions controls to work on smaller cheaper engines essential to cleaning up air quality and improving public health in many cities in India, China and elsewhere where rapid vehicle adoption means more tailpipes fouling the local air with toxic particles, fumes, smoke, soot, smog and worse or tailpipe pollutant emissions that react with sunlight to make ground level ozone and worse. In this way any meaningful improvement to a cheap effective emissions control system applied to small engines of scooter and motorcycles commonly used in such locals, means the air quality can be cleaned up and less harm to the lungs of local peoples who breath the emissions contaminated air.
Replacing metal with composite, plastics, and plant based fiber reinforced polymers, means a typical 1500kg or 3200 lb metal car can be mass reduced by 500kg or 1100 lbs, which improves fuel economy and reduces emissions by 10% or more, and also reduces the energy levels of collisions since such a vehicle in an accident has less total energy since it weighs less, thus smaller lower mass crumple zones, seat belts and airbags can radically improve passenger safety of mass reduced vehicles. Even reducing the use of iron with cleaver mixes or alloys of aluminum and magnesium and select use of titanium or similar high nickel stainless steel with vanadium and silicon, means automakers can use existing stamping equipment to make vehicles that are intrinsically lower mass or lighter weight by just replacing steel and iron with lower mass metals used in aircraft and spacecraft. This can shave out another 500kg or 1100lbs from an automobile. Lower mass wheels and tires made of aluminum magnesium alloy and fiber reinforced low rolling resistance tires compound tires can further improve fuel economy and lower emissions.
There are lots of ways to improve transportation for billions of people that have nothing to do with cars, like using trains they way they do in central Tokyo, Japan. City bus systems, in a way similar to the School Bus I drive professionally with a CDL to move more than 100 middle school students from their stops where I pick them up in the morning to School, and from School back to the stops near their homes in the afternoon. The large school bus I drive only gets 5 or 6 miles per gallon of diesel fuel, but when it filled with 50+ middle school students, the fuel economy per person increases to 250 MPG/person, similar to the way an airplane carrying 350 people can get over 50 MPG per person. A large cruise ship can move thousands of people. Trains can carry thousands of people. There are bicycles, e-bikes, ultra-light cars built like bicycles, and many other kinds of vehicles like electric kick scooters and similar that can be used to move people and stuff around cities, cargo bikes, cargo e-bikes, enclosed bicycles and enclosed motorcycles and enclosed scooters with than aero shell the provides weather protection.
It takes a complicated mix of roads, rails, vehicles of all kinds, fuels, electricity and many other industrial systems, and infrastructure of different kinds like dirt or gravel roads, wheels, tires, engines, motors, alternators, metals, wires, machines of many kinds made with other kinds of machines, welding, fabrication, mass production, vast industrialization of all sorts to support moving 8 billion people around daily. There is no one size fits all solution for everyone, though a regular bicycle seems to be a magic bullet in many situations, climate and locals, superior in some regards to walking because of the glide ratio, gearing and other mechanical advantages offered by the chain drive with different gear ratios the rider can select on the handlebars, along with safety brakes that grip the rim or brake rotors, even our cheap e-bike has hydraulic brakes :)
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