A green car technology company is using wave power to adapt cars, enabling them to use half the fuel of the average saloon car.
Midlothian-based Artemis Intelligent Power has converted a BMW saloon to capture energy normally wasted through braking.
Carbon emissions from the prototype reduced by 30 per cent in combined city and motorway driving.
The system, known as Digital Displacement, was originally developed to convert the irregular movements of waves into a steady stream of energy.
A hydraulic drive establishes regenerative braking to recapture wasted energy and used again when the car needs to accelerate. It both drives the wheels and compresses gas in an accumulator, to store energy, before returning it to the wheels when required.
The car ran on a mixture of stored energy and petrol in the same way that hybrid cars operate, with computer control technology to switch between the two power sources.
The system is also less expensive than the batteries used in existing hybrid vehicles.
Under European test conditions, the hybrid car used 52.7 per cent less fuel than a normal petrol BMW530i, 6.58l of fuel/100km against 13.89l/100km for the unmodified car. In more aggressive tests employed in the United States the hybrid car used a third less fuel than its petrol equivalent.
“A lot of people have played with hydraulics for car and trucks, but conventional hydraulics are very inefficient at part-load, when, for example, a car is cruising down the motorway. You can have perfectly good transmission, but if it is not effective at 20 per cent of full power it is a non-starter. What our technology brings is the ability to be efficient at 10 or 20 per cent of full power,” Waverley Cameron of Artemis Intelligent Power told The Telegraph.
Established in 1994, Artemis now employ around 50 people. Their Digital Displacement project is supported by the Department for Transport and the Energy Saving Trust.
