Technology Corner

Tooling the Streets

If you were to pick one invention that has made a large impact on your life, what would it be ?Would it be electricity? Or perhaps you might choose the telephone. Some might say that modern day medicine has made a difference to their lifestyles, while others would swear that they couldn't live without their television. There is one invention however that will undoubtedly be in the top ten. The Automobile.

This piece of machinery has been with us now for almost a century and has come to mean a great deal to a great many people. Some people could not operate without it, while others become obsessed with it's place in their lives. Most of us spend hours cleaning them, maintaining them and when things aren't happening as they should be, swearing at them.

The Automobile is responsible for some of the worst pollution to date and is also using up non-renewable fossil fuels almost as fast as they can be dragged from the below the earth's surface. It is an accomplice to some of the most horrific accidents and causes more deaths than practically any other medium. Even after you have considered all of these factors, we still get into the drivers seat and shoot off to our next destination.

These days a car is designed to protect it's occupants. It does this using a wide array of techniques that have taken years for industry gurus to design. Airbags have caught on in a big way with a lot of new car models including them as standard equipment. Collapsible steering column and pedals, reinforced body cages, crumple zones, Anti-Lock breaks and Inertia Reel seat belts have also helped reduced the fatalities caused by road accidents.

However this is a Technology Column and not current affairs.
So what is happening in the high tech motor industry? At the moment a great deal of research is being directed at reducing the amount of fuel that a car uses. The way that most of the manufacturers are approaching this problem is by making the fuel / air mixture "leaner". This means adding less fuel and therefore lowering fuel consumption. It also means that the emissions of the vehicle are lowered which helps them conform to the tough guidelines that governments are starting to impose on most road users. The only problem with this technique is that the more you reduce the fuel content within the cylinder prior to it's ignition, the harder it is to ignite the mixture. In petrol engines, the fuel is ignited by a high voltage spark. However there is a limit to the voltage that your average spark plug can carry before it starts to degrade the insulation that separates the live core from the earth. Work is being done to eliminate this problem by allowing the charge to spark acro! ss t he gap between the cylinder head and the top of the piston.

Another development is that of an automated cruise control. At the moment cruise controls simply hold a car at a steady speed until the break pedal is applied. This is useful for repetitive Motorway / Freeway driving. However a new intelligent system is being developed that employs the merits of Radar. The system can detect the presence of a vehicle in front of it and in the same lane. Once a vehicle has been detected, then the system will then keep a safe distance from it, by automatically matching it's speed. Should the gap suddenly start to reduce then the breaks are swiftly and automatically applied.

With each new model that a major manufacturer releases, more high tech goodies come as standard. The days of a fully automated vehicle that can drive itself to a preset destination are not, I feel, far away.

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