Annual Merit Review, Vehicle Technologies Program, 2011. 146 p.The Advanced Combustion Engine subprogram of the U.S. Department of Energy's Vehicle Technologies Program (VTP) is improving the fuel economy of passenger vehicles (cars and light trucks) and commercial vehicles (medium-duty and commercial trucks) by increasing the efficiency of the engines that power them. Work is done in collaboration with industry, national laboratories, and universities, as well as in conjunction with the U.S. DRIVE Partnership for passenger vehicle applications and the 21st Century Truck Partnership for commercial vehicle applications. Research and development (R&D) efforts focus on improving engine efficiency while meeting future federal and state emissions regulations through a combination of: combustion technologies that minimize in-cylinder formation of emissions; aftertreatment technologies that further reduce exhaust emissions; and understanding fuel property impacts on combustion and emissions. Technologies that improve the overall engine performance are also pursued.
In this merit review activity, each reviewer was asked to respond to a series of questions, involving multiple-choice responses, expository responses where text comments were requested, and numeric score responses (on a scale of 1 to 4). In the pages that follow, the reviewer responses to each question for each project will be summarized: the multiple choice and numeric score questions will be presented in graph form for each project, and the expository text responses will be summarized in paragraph form for each question. A table presenting the average numeric score for each question for each project is presented below.
