By Ann Roosevelt
Oshkosh Corp. [OSK] will research next generation diesel-electric and hybrid-electric drive technologies to improve fuel efficiency and on- board power capability, officials said.
“We have ongoing programs on technology development and these particular R&D contracts are an extension of that,” Chris Yakes, director of Advanced Products at Oshkosh Defense, told Defense Daily.
The company recently received two contracts from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) for the work. Additionally, Marine Corps Program Executive Office (PEO) Land Systems is providing technical and program support for each effort. The work on both contracts runs through 2011.
Under the first contract, Oshkosh will conduct hybridization and repower research efforts for the Marine’s Medium Tactical Vehicle Replacement On Board Vehicle Power (MTVR OBVP).
Nader Nasr, senior chief engineer, said, “We’re looking at the addition of energy storage to recapture some of the braking energy and provide some improvements in fuel economy. We’ll be integrating an ultra-capacitor energy storage system to the existing MTVR diesel-electric design. In addition to that, we will be looking at repowering that vehicle with a new higher efficiency engine, lighter weight engine.”
These will lead to improvements in mobility and in fuel economy, he said. At the same time, the MTVR’s mobility, performance and effectiveness will be maintained.
The second contract is an extension to the Oshkosh’s current diesel-electric platforms developing a new lighter weight generator to integrate into them, Nasr said. “We see a lot of opportunity to reduce the design and we proposed to start this R&D work to come up with a lighter weight synchronous generator. We’re looking for 40-50 percent improvement in the weight of these machines, mostly from the electro-magnetic design.”
The company is looking at different cooling options and thermal management. “The size of those machines is all about managing heat losses. You reduce the losses, find better ways of managing the thermals and you’re able to shrink the size of the magnetics,” Nasr said.
At the same time, the vehicle performance and power qualities must be maintained. Another part of the contract is to develop a next-generation traction system for improved off- road mobility with increased efficiency.
“We have a lot of active advanced technology programs,” Yakes said. The MTVR OBVP program is a diesel-electric vehicle also produced for ONR. It’s been through testing. It is focused on producing export power for the Marines.
Nasr said in the next few months, the MTVR OBVP launches into low-rate production.
Yakes said, “We have our finger on what the Marine Corps is looking for especially when it comes to what you might call combat multipliers–where you add functionality to vehicles. In this case, we’ve added a very large amount of export power to that vehicle to the tune of 120 kilowatts of military grade power while stationary, and 21 kilowatts of power while the vehicle is moving.”
The Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck (HEMTT) A3 is another such program, Yakes said. “The vehicle is a hybrid electric diesel that is focused on export power to the tune of 100 kilowatts and fuel-efficiency increase of about 20 percent. That’s looking at all the future requirements for vehicles out there, that is a higher performing, lower weight, higher capability vehicle than existing conventional vehicle designs.”
Such research can translate to other Oshkosh platforms, Yakes said. “We’ve been working a lot on the commercial side with hybrid diesel electric prototypes for refuse trucks and have a very robust program with the Department of Energy (DoE), which just ended this past year.”
The about five-year program with DoE oversight was “to prove how you could produce a vehicle that actually gets twice the fuel economy of a conventional vehicle.”
Additionally, there is considerable interest in having a lot of export power on emergency vehicles.
For example, Oshkosh Defense deployed some of its military vehicles during Hurricane Katrina that produced extra power and actually were used to power up Charity Hospital, which was without power, Yakes said.
There’s a lot of potential cross-pollination with these technologies, Yakes said. Some of the work could translate into smaller vehicles. “It is scalable.”
However, Oshkosh focuses on heavy vehicles where requirements are “drastically” different than commercial passenger vehicles. “It would be ‘overkill’ for passenger type application,” Nasr said.
“We really want to make sure the design is optimized per the customer requirements,” Yakes said. “We work very transparently with the customer. They see everything we’re doing. We have a lot of design reviews…We want to make sure what we’re producing or developing is exactly what they need.”