At least a third of a car’s fuel consumption is spent overcoming friction, according to new research, and reducing friction could play an important role in improving fuel efficiency.
A joint study by VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) in USA, suggests that new technology could reduce friction by up to 80 per cent in various components of a car, meaning that it should be possible to reduce fuel consumption and emissions by 18 per cent within the next five years.
What’s more, further work in the field in reducing friction could result in a 61 per cent improvement in efficiency within 15 to 25 years.
According to the research, there are 612 million cars in the world today. The average car is calculated as clocking up an average of 13,000 km (8,078 miles) per year, and in the meantime burns 340 litres of fuel just to overcome friction, costing the driver €510 per year.
Of the energy output of fuel in a car engine, 33 per cent is spent in exhaust, 29 per cent in cooling and 38 per cent in mechanical energy, of which friction losses account for 33 per cent and air resistance for 5 per cent. By comparison, an electric car has only half the friction loss of that of a car with a conventional internal combustion engine.
Annual friction loss in an average car worldwide amounts to 11,860 MJ: of this, 35 per cent is spent in overcoming rolling resistance in the wheels, 35 per cent in the engine itself, 15 per cent in the gearbox and 15 per cent in braking. With current technology, only 21.5 per cent of the energy output of the fuel is used to actually move the car; the rest is wasted.
Technologies such as new surface coatings, surface textures, lubricant additives, low-viscosity lubricants, ionic liquids and low-friction tyres could all help cut fuel consumption. Friction could be reduced by 10 per cent to 50 per cent using new surface technologies alone, such as diamond-like carbon materials and nanocomposites. In 2009, a total of 208,000 million litres of fuel was burned in cars worldwide just to overcome friction; this amounts to 7.3 million TJ (terajoules) of energy. Theoretically, introducing the best current technological solutions in all of the world’s cars could save €348,000 million per year; with the best solutions to emerge over the next 10 years saving €659,000 million per year.
The recent research report on friction loss in cars s was published in the Tribology International scientific journal.
