Can a Hummer—known for being a symbol of excess and luxury—change from environmental offender to eco-savvy? Dr. Ali Emadi of Illinois Institute of Technology says “HECK” yes.
For more than a decade, Dr. Emadi has pioneered the research and development of new technologies to improve the efficiency and lower the cost of hybrid electric vehicles. His research lab has developed a superior hybrid electric system that is designed to retrofit—or add on to—large vehicles that are already in use like SUVs and Hummers. With the help of federal and private sector grants, award-winning faculty, and dozens theses by some of the world’s best engineers, Emadi’s team finally developed a fully operational hybrid electric conversion kit (HECK) for large vehicles.
The HECK system can be produced using off-the-shelf components and is driven by the IIT patented proprietary control mechanism, most simply described as the “brain” of the vehicle.
Emadi’s academic teams studied the mechanical, hydraulic, magnetic, electrical, and chemical subsystems of Hummers and considered multiple situations involving different vehicle dynamics, fuel consumption, system level issues, temperature, and driving conditions. Their findings state that IIT’s HECK will improve acceleration and reduce fuel consumption significantly in large vehicles!
According to their figures, once working prototypes are deployed, the HECK can be produced and installed at a low cost—depending on the price fluctuation of the component parts and installation labor costs. HECK can also be implemented to hybridize busses and large mass transit vehicles. By retrofitting their current vehicles, organizations that use busses, trucks, and the like could stand to save millions of dollars in fuel cost alone. Government organizations such as militaries and large cities could stand to save even more.
Fernando Rodriguez was raised in East Chicago, Indiana, which is located about 20 miles southeast of Illinois Institute of Technology. He received his B.S. (2002), M.S. (2004), and Ph.D. (2006) degrees from IIT all in electrical engineering under the direction of Dr. Ali Emadi. As one of the first Grainger Scholarship recipients, Rodriguez worked his way through the curriculum and served as an advisor to younger students. For his Ph.D. studies, he received the Diversifying Higher Education Faculty in Illinois (DFI) Fellowship. He also served as the laboratory manager of the Power Electronics and Motor Drives Lab at IIT.
“I had absolutely no idea that I would study power electronics when I chose IIT,” Rodriguez says. “I found out two years into my bachelor’s degree that power electronics is an exciting and young field with lots of opportunities for research. Once I got my feet wet, it was pretty clear that motor drives was the right area of research for me.”
