Revolutionary Turbo-charged Engine with Dual-clutch Transmission Launched by Chinese Domestic Auto Manufacturer—BYD

Today at the Shanghai Auto Show, BYD announced a revolutionary turbo- charged, fuel efficient, all-aluminum-alloy gasoline Engine designed and manufactured entirely in China. BYD designed this highly-efficient, break-through 1.5L Engine and has paired it with a six (6)-Speed Tiptronic “dual clutch transmission” -- coining the combo, the BYD “Ti+DCT”. BYD has led the Chinese industry with innovations in new energy technologies with their environmentally-friendly, rechargeable-energy, ET power systems for electric vehicles and in December 2008 launched mass-production of the “dual-mode” electric and hybrid-electric tandem engines in the F3DM. With the release of this Ti+DCT engine, BYD shows that they are still committed to improving thief full line of gasoline-only engine designs, staying at the forefront of internal-combustion engine technology.

“BYD has been working on the Ti+DCT technology for over 2 years and owns the intellectual property supporting this technology”

Ti+DCT is short for turbo-fuel-stratified, injection engine with dual-clutch transmission. This system is capable of producing not only, higher power, but smoother performance with superior fuel-efficiency. “BYD has been working on the Ti+DCT technology for over 2 years and owns the intellectual property supporting this technology,” according to Stella Li, Senior Vice President of BYD. The Ti+DCT is a standard option on the BYD G6 1.5Ti sedan and is available as an option for other BYD 3 series models.

BYD’s Ti – Turbo-charged, fuel-stratified, all-aluminum-alloy, injection engine improved maximum power with minimized fuel consumption and can match or beat the top foreign turbo technologies in performance specifications. The BYD 1.5 Ti engine produces 1.43 times more power than the same displacement engine and is equivalent to a 2.4 L gasoline engine. It provides a maximum torque output of 240Nm / 1750-3500 RPM. Currently, only one other foreign brand is offering a turbo-charged engine that is comparable in the Chinese markets. BYD is the first domestic Chinese company to develop this technology in-house, solidifying its competitive edge in the automotive industry. The BYD DCT technology – an advanced 6-Speed Tiptronic dual-clutch design, is a perfect combination of manual transmission and conventional automatic transmission with shorter gear shifting, faster acceleration and response times, and has selective driving modes. In the “sports mode”, the DCT electronic programming controls shifting, allowing drivers to enjoy a sports-car-like driving experience. This Turbo-charged, fuel-stratified injection engine and dual-clutch transmission (Ti-DCT) will be commercially available later this year.

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Beijing to become a paradise for electric vehicle sales

I often wondered why Chinese auto makers would push forth with their electric and hybrid concepts at auto shows, its not as if there is a huge market for them in China, from China Car Times own articles you can easily see that sales are rather weak, this article states that only 54 hybrid and new energy vehicles were sold between January and October 2010, butBYD cleared sales of 74 BYD F3DM’s in March which goes some way to showing that the market is improving somewhat for hybrid vehicles and China seems to be slowly moving away from the No Demand for Hybrids in China headlines.

Yesterday morning I received an email from The Truth About Cars Bertel Schmit, he wanted me to join his campaign to persuade the Beijing government to offer free license plates to EV buyers in a bid to boost the local car market. Beijing killed its local car market this year after nearly 800,000 cars took to dusty capitals roads in 2010, for 2011 the government offered just 20,000 license plates per month that could be gained via a lottery. Of the 20,000 lucky winners in January, just 2000 people went on to buy a car, they do of course have three months to buy a car before their license plate ticket gets thrown back into the pool. What Bertel didn’t realize is that just as he posted his plans for free license plates for EV buyers in Beijing, is that the Beijing Municipal Govt announced the very next morning that they were going to do exactly what Bertel was suggesting.

Beijing has announced that its ’125 Project’ has already received official approval and will begin the creation of a strategically important electric car industry within the capital.

The ’125 project’ was initiated by Beijing Automotive Industry Organisation and was quickly approved by Beijing Municipal Economic and Reform Council, by 2015 the production of electric cars in Beijing is to reach the 100,000 units per year barrier.

According to what we have learned so far, pure electric vehicles, (EV’s) are to become the major benefactor from the new plan. Beijing’s own local manufacturers such as Foton and Beijing Auto are expected to gain the most from the new plans, as both of these companies already have electric vehicles ready to role. Foton has introduced its Midi electric van into the market as a taxi and BAIC are planning to launch electric variants of their Saab based products and also the C30 hatchback. (BAIC actually has the following electric vehicles in development: Q60FB、C30DB、701EV、C71EV)

The biggest news is obviously for the end consumer, instead of dreaming about getting the much coveted Beijing tin plate for their gasoline based car they will be able to buy the EV straight off the shelf without having to wait in line for a lottery, they wont be subjected to the odd/even license plate restrictions that Beijing has introduced and more importantly they wont have to pay sales tax on their EV – the biggest kicker of all will be the 120,000rmb subsidy that Beijing is offering to buyers of electric vehicles.

Why the absence of hybrids in this plan? It appears that Beijing Govt is wise to Chinese automakers and their attempts to roll out mild hybrids, essentially cars with larger than normal alternators that allow for stop and start systems, Beijing is clearly looking to jump the hybrid generation and go straight for the EV jugular.

So will the EV sales begin to fly in Beijing? Not quite so fast, there is still a severe lack of showroom ready EV’s, you cannot walk into a dealership yet and buy the BYD E6 or the Riich M1 EV or any of the other Chinese made EV’s as of yet.

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Bill Joy: Better batteries key to Green power adoption

Kleiner Perkins' Green guru believes on a household level, green power needs to recharge advanced batteries rather than plug right into the fuse-box.

Bill Joy of Kleiner Perkins. Credit: Russ Curtis

FORTUNE -- Having helped both create the Java programming language and co-found Sun Microsystems, Bill Joy is best known as a technologist and entrepreneur. He hopes to add environmentalist to that list.

As a partner at leading venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, Joy is devoting much of his time to overseeing Kleiner's portfolio of nearly 60 green start-ups.  He spoke at Fortune's Brainstorm Green conference about what green technologies he believes are most likely to work, and why.

Joy is a believer in wind, or perhaps more accurately, micro-wind.  The big problem with wind power to date, he said, is that small windmills cost far more per watt generated than do large wind farms with giant turbines and huge blades—sometime ten times as much. "The smaller wind gets the more expensive it gets," Joy said.

That gap can be closed, or at least greatly narrowed, Joy argued, just the way that better technology allowed microprocessors to replace mainframes, shrinking the physical computer and the cost of computing at the same time. FloDesign, a company that Kleiner Perkins has backed, has used a new design based on airplane engines, fundamentally changing the aerodynamics and, Joy says, the economics.

That company's product won a design award for and earlier version of product three years ago, but despite the slow development Joy remains jazzed on the potential.

A pair of Joy's other green goals: "The ability to store and retrieve electrons at low cost [and] the ability to make them distributed and cheap."

If consumers can generate cheaper wind or solar power on their own property, he said, the next key will be matching that power with when it's actually needed.  That means better batteries. "The grid moves things in space, batteries move things in time," Joy said.

Again the problem is scale. Systems to store green power by pumping water uphill then releasing it to generate power when its needed work in industrial settings, but not in a private home. Joy sees a few different viable options for personal power storage.

The first small-scale option is using compressed air to store and release power, Joy said.  Another: build  a cheaper twist on today's lithium ion batteries. The trick, he says, is building slightly larger batteries than you'd find in a laptop and using water as the electrolyte.

One green disappointment for Joy: a failure to build a breakthrough desalination process that could cheaply turn seawater into drinking water.  The stumbling block he said, is that there so far has been no way around using heat to power the process. "Anybody who's worked with hot salt water knows how corrosive and nasty a thing it is."

Joy is still optimistic about water purification technology.  With the desalination dream on hold, he has devoted more effort to reclaiming "used" water, which might come with more bacteria than sea water, but doesn't have all the nasty salt.

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Turning China green: Li Lu's case for optimism

China will grow on a scale the world has never seen before. Can that growth be green?

Image via Wikipedia

The environmental consequences of China's economic growth are both well-known and horrifying: more cars, more coal and more toxic crud fouling its streams and rivers. Less appreciated are the reasons for hope.

"This is a critical year, really a transformational moment," says Li Lu, the chairman of Himalaya Capital Management and a leading candidate to take over for Warren Buffett when the investing guru eventually retires.  (Li's chances improved recently when leading rival David Sokol parted ways with Berkshire Hathaway (BRKB).)

The Chinese government is mulling a five-year plan with potentially dramatic goals for reductions in pollution, Li told an audience at Fortune's Brainstorm Green conference this week. China's two major power grids are both testing systems that can store green energy from wind and solar. If they prove efficient in ongoing trials, Li believes, it will open the door to the government rolling out clean energy "on a gigawatt scale in a short amount of time."

The driving force behind the coming green wave -- if it indeed materializes -- will not be the massive carbon dioxide output by China, which has passed the U.S. as the biggest greenhouse gas emitter. Instead it's the sulfer dioxide the country's coal plants emit, he says. "The real threat of coal in China is not the CO2 it's the SO2.  It's killing people," Li says.

Li believes that the best bet for quickly and dramatically slashing its reliance on coal are deposits of natural gas buried deep underneath the country. While not as well understood as the massive shale deposits in the U.S. that have boosted the production of natural gas and sent its price plunging, Li is confident China's shale holds similar good news.

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Powerway joins hands with BYD to supply Africa with electricity

Powerway continues to extend applications for its mounting systems, for clean energy, after its Hunan project. Recently, Powerway worked together with BYD to supply electricity to regions in Africa that have no power. 

The project focused on areas in Africa with low latitude, in order to meet the latitude and location requirements of different regions. Powerway designs adjustable mounting systems, which feature multi-directional adjustment angles and other functions. 

As a professional manufacturer of mounting systems, Powerway applies rigorous mechanical calculations to every project, to ensure the safety of the systems. We will, as always, continue our contributions to photovoltaic system security. 

Where there is sunshine, there is Powerway! 


About Powerway 

Powerway is China’s leading PV mounting system designer and manufacturer with in house extrusion facilities, fabrication workshop, engineering team, testing lab, etc, offering one stop solution to customer worldwide. Now they have been working with many EPC players for the MW projects located in USA, Italy, India, China, etc. 

Read more from http://www.pvpowerway.com/

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Interview with Lee Kuan Yew

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