The world needs to clean up how it gets around in a big way if we want any hope of leaving a planet for our kids to inherit. This sadly means that motorsport is in the cross hairs of environmentalists looking for activities that should be scrapped in order to cut emissions and reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. Help may be on the horizon for race fans, as a team of researchers in the UK has created a clean new racer that runs on a byproduct from the sewage industry.
From the outside, the Warwick Manufacturing Group’s LMP3 racer looks like any other LMP3 racer that you might see at events like the European Le Mans Series. Under the hood, however, the concept racer is a very different beast.
That’s because this endurance racer runs on waste from the sewage industry, reports BBC Sport. To do this, the car isn’t packed full of raw sewage and sent out on track, instead it’s been converted to run on hydrogen and uses gas created as a byproduct of sewage treatment to power it on track
To do this, a team that includes students from the University of Warwick in the UK investigated the way sewage breaks down in water treatment plants around the world. During this process, hydrogen gas is released by microbes that break down organic compounds in the waste, which WMG then collects, condenses and fills the tanks on its race car with, as the BBC explains:
They believe the car could be out in the mainstream in as little as five years, though they acknowledge there are still significant hurdles to overcome.
“There’s been a real push for electric vehicles and it’s fairly clear that there has to be other sort of energy in the mix as well, so hydrogen has a part to play,” Dr James Meredith, chief engineer at WMG, told BBC Sport.
“It comes from a long period of research. A microbial electrolysis cell is essentially a device used to clean water and microbes grow on recycled carbon fiber, eating the sewage. During that process, they produce hydrogen as a by-product.”
The hydrogen won’t be fed into a fuel cell that creates electricity to power a motor, as you find in something like a Toyota Mirai. Instead, a supercharged V6 engine from Revolution Cars has been converted to burn the hydrogen and run like a normal internal-combustion engine. This means that race fans will still be treated to the roar of a motor rather than the hum of an EV.
What’s more, the LMP3 racer uses a slew of other eco-minded parts in its construction, such as recycled carbon fiber, plant-based composites and reclaimed car batteries, reports Autosport:
“The carbon fiber, that would normally end up being in landfill, the natural fibers, then end up being composted, or animal feed or something like that. So doing something like this is so much greater for those materials and showing off what you can do with it,” added [professor Kerry Kirwan, chair of sustainable materials and manufacturing at WMG].
“The batteries are recovered from wrecks, the whole thing is made of stuff that would have ended up going down different routes that would have been nowhere near as good as this, and that was the idea, just show potential.”
The team is hoping to prove the concept’s worth with a run at a handful of land speed records, including fastest standing and flying starts over a mile and a kilometer. If it works out, the project will follow the launch of Extreme H in bringing hydrogen power to the world of motorsport after electric off-road series Extreme E rebranded ahead of the new season.
