Nissan Develops Better Diode
All we hear about these days is how overweight we are as a nation. I go out for bike rides and see folks wheezing along doing their best to trim their waist lines. (And having just done that myself, I cheer them along.) But we, as individuals, aren’t the only ones being weight conscious. Every automaker who has, by inclination or necessity, jumped on the race to produce “the” next green car is thinking about the waist line and poundage of their latest creations.
Nissan is joining the fray a little late, but they are also claiming that they’ve come up with a way to reduce both the size and weight of their electric inverters by 20 percent. If you’re a little shaky on the technology, inverters take the direct current coming off the battery and make it alternating current used by the electric motor to turn the wheels.
Nissan has developed a more efficient diode to regulate the current between the battery and the motor thus allowing the inverters to be 15 percent smaller and 20 percent lighter. That means more efficient and even smaller hybrids, a real plus since the one draw back to these vehicles is that the batteries are hefty — and it doesn’t matter why flavor we’re talking, nickel-metal hydride or lithium ion.
Right now Nissan is putting the new diode through its paces on an X-Trail fuel cell vehicle, but the plan is for the technology to find its way into all hybrid and electric products the company rolls out. Currently Nissan has a timetable of 2010 to launch a compact electric and an in-house hybrid.