While battery-electric vehicles are a viable alternative to traditional gas-powered cars, it has not proved quite as easy to replace heavy-duty machinery that runs on diesel with battery-powered alternatives. Marquette University assistant professor of mechanical engineering Adam Dempsey is working to develop cleaner alternatives, Marquette Today reported.
Dempsey's work, buoyed by $4.5 million in federal grants, involves converting the existing heavy-duty engines that power ships, excavators, and tractors into new versions that can run on a mix of fuels such as gasoline, ethanol, methanol, propane.
While this is not the perfect solution to the problem, in that these fuel mixes will still produce planet-overheating air pollution when burned, total emissions would be less than if just diesel were burned, Dempsey said.
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Diesel fuel is refined from crude oil and biomass, which means that while diesel-powered engines technically emit less carbon dioxide than similarly sized gas-powered engines, they also emit harmful particulate air pollution that can cause respiratory health problems for anyone in their immediate vicinity.
Dempsey's work developing alternative fuel mixes is not just theoretical — he has also partnered with companies that rely on diesel engines to encourage industry adoption.
The challenge of industry adoption is "why partnerships involving equipment companies such as John Deere are so important," Dempsey said. "These partnerships help streamline the process of taking technologies from the lab to the market, where it can have an impact on society."
Other attempts to replace polluting, diesel-burning engines have included even more difficult-to-achieve ideas, such as engines that run on hydrogen combustion, which would produce zero air pollution at the point of use, as well as fully battery-electric heavy-duty vehicles.
While the technology around those advancements still needs to improve if they are to become commercially viable, solutions such as Dempsey's are a great stopgap to reduce our air-polluting emissions.
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