Centenary Lecture Series
October 7, 2009 at 5pm
Future Vehicles and Fuels: Our Challenges and Options
Professor
John B. Heywood
Sun Jae Professor of Mechanical Engineering,
Director of the Sloan Automotive Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Personal mobility has always been highly valued. We are now being forced to question whether the extraordinary trends in mobility that have characterised the past 50 years are sustainable. Too many of us are using too much of our available resources, which we are using in ways that irreversibly damage our environment.
In this lecture, Professor Heywood will explore our options for responding to the challenges that transportation now faces. These options are: improve the efficiency of the technologies we use in our vehicles, develop alternatives to our complete reliance on petroleum-based fuels, use our roadway infrastructure more effectively, and travel less.
Download lecture slides in Adobe PDF formatEvolutionary improvements in these areas can stop the current growth in transportation's fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions and, if we work hard at this, start us on a decreasing consumption and emissions path. But this will not be easy since costs will rise and constraints on how we travel will be needed.
Longer-term major transformations in our vehicles, fuels, and how we use them will be required. The potentially promising longer-term energy options are using electricity and hydrogen. While these could be "greener and cleaner," achieving such transformations on a massive scale pose immense challenges.
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About Professor John B. Heywood
Professor Heywood did his undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering at Cambridge University and his graduate work at MIT. He then worked for the British Central Electricity Generating Board on magnetohydrodynamic power generation.
Since 1968 he has been a faculty member at MIT, where is he now Director of the Sloan Automotive Laboratory and Sun Jae Professor of Mechanical Engineering. His research is focused on the design and operating characteristics of internal combustion engines, their fuels requirements, and broader studies of future transportation technologies and their fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. He has also worked on design and manufacturing issues in MIT’s Leaders for Manufacturing Program where he was Engineering Co-Director.
He is currently involved in studies of the energy and environmental impacts of future technology and fuels.
He has published some 200 papers in the technical literature, holds a number of patents, and has won many awards for his professional contributions. He holds a Sc.D. degree from Cambridge University for his published research contributions. He is a author of a major text and professional reference “Internal Combustion Engine Fundamentals,” and co-author with Professor Sher of “The Two-Stroke Cycle Engine: Its Development, Operation, and Design.”
From 1992-1997 he led MIT’s Mechanical Engineering Department’s efforts to develop and introduce a new undergraduate curriculum. In 1982 he was elected a Fellow of the Society of Automotive Engineers. He was honored by the 1996 U.S. Department of Transportation National Award for the Advancement of Motor Vehicle Research and Development. He is a consultant to the U.S. Government and a number of industrial organizations. He was elected to membership in the National Academy of Engineering in 1998.
In 1999, Chalmers University of Technology awarded him the degree of Doctor of Technology honoris causa. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001.
He is now co-directing MIT’s Mechanical Engineering Department’s Center for 21st Century Energy which is developing a broader set of energy research initiatives. In January 2003, Professor Heywood was appointed Co-Director of the Ford-MIT Alliance. In 2004, City University, London, awarded him the degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causa.