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Passenger trains
Using simple text and pictures, this book describes what passenger trains are like, and what they do.
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Automobiles on Steroids: Product Attribute Trade-Offs and Technological Progress in the Automobile Sector
This paper estimates the technological progress that has occurred since 1980 in the automobile industry and the trade-offs faced when choosing between fuel economy, weight, and engine power characteristics. The results suggest that if weight, horsepower, and torque were held at their 1980 levels, fuel economy could have increased by nearly 60 percent from 1980 to 2006. Once technological progress is considered, meeting the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards adopted in 2007 will require halting the trend in weight and engine power characteristics, but little more. In contrast, the standards recently announced by the new administration, while attainable, require nontrivial \"downsizing.\"
Journal Article
Vibrating materialities: mobility-body-technology relations
This paper contributes to debates that consider the corporeal experience of mobilities. Drawing on some experiences of railway travel in Britain, it explores the experience of movement through the event of vibration. Vibration opens up ways of thinking about the uncertain and provisional connections between bodies, their travelling environments and the experience of movement that do not rely on dualistic or causal renderings of materiality. As such, this paper explores the generative possibilities that vibration opens up by considering how vibration change the shape of body-technology assemblages; challenge us to think about different assemblages in terms of their capacity for absorption, diffusion and transmission; and generate particular collectives. The paper concludes by considering how these vibrations sit within contemporary sensory economies of smoothness and turbulence.
Journal Article
Upgrading in the automotive industry: firm-level evidence from Central Europe
Drawing on the global value chains and global production networks perspectives and using financial indicators for individual firms, we evaluate industrial upgrading of 490 Czech-based automotive firms during the period of significant inflows of foreign direct investment into the Czech automotive industry between 1998 and 2006. We consider differences among process, product and functional upgrading and the effect of government policies on upgrading of Czech-based automotive firms. We also evaluate the differences between the domestic- and foreign-owned automotive firms and changes in the relative position of Czechia in European automotive value chains. Despite the documented major changes in the Czech automotive industry between 1998 and 2006, the analyzed data suggest the selective nature of industrial upgrading at the firm level.
Journal Article
Travelling vulnerabilities: mobile timespaces of quiescence
This paper investigates the relationship between mobility and embodied experiences of quiescence. Rather than conceptualizing quiescence as an experience that is opposite to activity, this paper explores how various experiences of quiescence emerge through the course of a railway journey. The first section of the paper illustrates how particular dispositions of vulnerability have the potential to generate a series of desirable quiescent experiences such as daydreaming and relaxation. The second section explores how these vulnerable dispositions also have the potential to generate a series of less-comfortable quiescent experiences such as lethargy, tiredness and agitation. In doing so, this paper emphasizes the necessity to take seriously how the experience of travel itself impacts on and conditions the affective capacities of the travelling body for feeling in particular ways. In contrast to work within cultural geography that has focused on the conscious, reflective and signifying practices of the body, this paper illuminates how the multiplicity of quotidian quiescent experiences induces a different set of experiential relationships between a more vulnerable body and the tdmespace of the railway journey.
Journal Article
Traffic safety and vehicle choice: quantifying the effects of the 'arms race' on American roads
The increasing share of light trucks in the USA has been characterized as an 'arms race' where individual purchases of light trucks for better self-protection nevertheless worsen traffic safety for society. This paper investigates the interrelation between traffic safety and vehicle choice by quantifying the effects of the arms race on vehicle demand, producer performance, and traffic safety. The analysis suggests that the accident externality of a light truck amounts to $2444 during vehicle lifetime and that 12% of new light trucks sold in 2006 and 204 traffic fatalities could have been attributed to the arms race.
Journal Article
Evaluation of Valve Train Variability in Diesel Engines
The continuously decreasing emission limits lead to a growing importance of exhaust aftertreatment in Diesel engines. Hence, methods for achieving a rapid catalyst light-off after engine cold start and for maintaining the catalyst temperature during low load operation will become more and more necessary. The present work evaluates several valve timing strategies concerning their ability for doing so. For this purpose, simulations as well as experimental investigations were conducted. A special focus of simulation was on pointing out the relevance of exhaust temperature, mass flow and enthalpy for these thermomanagement tasks. An increase of exhaust temperature is beneficial for both catalyst heat-up and maintaining catalyst temperature. In case of the exhaust mass flow, high values are advantageous only in case of a catalyst heat-up process, while maintaining catalyst temperature is supported by a low mass flow. Another focus of simulation was on analyzing the exhaust temperature gaining effects relevant for the considered alternative valve timings. Simulation results have shown that an early exhaust valve opening, a late intake valve closing and the deactivation of cylinders is of particular interest for exhaust thermomanagement. Besides the validation of simulation results, the main focus of measurements was on analyzing effects which are not covered by simulation (transient operation, cold engine conditions 298 K, emissions, test cycles), which is exemplarily shown here for early exhaust valve opening (EEVO). In addition to the methods based on alternative valve timings, conventional exhaust thermomanagement methods like a retarded combustion were also considered in simulations. Moreover, an electrical heating device was considered experimentally and compared to EEVO in the FTP75 with regard to SULEV30 for passenger cars.
Journal Article
Control of a Combined SCR on Filter and Under-Floor SCR System for Low Emission Passenger Cars
Similar to single-brick SCR architectures, the multi-brick SCR systems described in this paper require urea injection control software that meets the NOₓ conversion performance target while maintaining the tailpipe NH₃ slip below a given threshold, under all driving conditions.
The SCR architectures containing a close-coupled SCRoF and underfloor SCR are temperature-wise more favorable than the under-floor location and lead to significant improvement of the global NOₓ conversion, compared to a single-brick system. But in order to maximize the benefit of close-coupling, the urea injection control must maximize the NH₃ stored in the SCRoF.
The under-floor SCR catalyst can be used as an NH₃ slip buffer, lowering the risk of NH₃ slip at the tailpipe with some benefit on the global NOₓ conversion of the system. With this approach, the urea injection strategy has a limited control on the NH₃ coverage of the under-floor SCR catalyst.
To take more advantage of the under-floor SCR catalyst for improving the NOₓ conversion, the NH₃ coverage of the under-floor SCR must be taken into account, and therefore a combined control of both catalysts is required. This paper presents a control strategy proposal for such multi-brick SCR systems: the NH₃ coverage of the SCRoF is optimized while taking into account the current states of front and rear SCR catalysts. The strategy focuses on achieving highest NOₓ conversion efficiency while preventing excessive tailpipe NH₃ slip, even in the worst driving conditions, such as sudden full-load acceleration.
Journal Article
SHORT REPORT: The risk of airborne influenza transmission in passenger cars
Travel in passenger cars is a ubiquitous aspect of the daily activities of many people. During the 2009 influenza A(H1N1) pandemic a case of probable transmission during car travel was reported in Australia, to which spread via the airborne route may have contributed. However, there are no data to indicate the likely risks of such events, and how they may vary and be mitigated. To address this knowledge gap, we estimated the risk of airborne influenza transmission in two cars (1989 model and 2005 model) by employing ventilation measurements and a variation of the Wells-Riley model. Results suggested that infection risk can be reduced by not recirculating air; however, estimated risk ranged from 59% to 99.9% for a 90-min trip when air was recirculated in the newer vehicle. These results have implications for interrupting in-car transmission of other illnesses spread by the airborne route.
Journal Article