Eighty-seven days of continuous poor air quality in Los Angeles County and the surrounding areas are now over.  This is the longest stretch of uninterrupted heavy smog for the L.A. area in twenty years.  As with all things environmental, the media will blame Donald J. Trump.  However, the reality is quite different.

Smog is formed from a combination of tailpipe emissions of nitric oxides (NOx), sunlight, and volatile organic compounds (VOCs).  The VOCs can be the result of a variety of natural and man-made sources such as pine trees, brewing beer, and gasoline vapors.  NOx is generated from burning gasoline or diesel fuel under compression in an internal combustion engine.  The VOCs react with sunlight and NOx to create oozone (O3).  Ground-level ozone is the brown haze that we call smog.

The catalytic converters on automobiles today work to reduce NOx emissions but not eliminate them entirely.  The catalytic converter works only when the heat of the exhaust gases has reached a threshold temperature, so for the first ten minutes of run time on a car, the emissions of NOx are unabated.  Additionally, over time, the catalytic converters get contaminated and degrade in effectiveness at reducing NOx emissions.

Virtually every major city in the world is plagued with poor air quality.  The health effects are estimated by the World Health Organization to cause one in eight deaths globally from illness exacerbated by poor air quality.

So what is the solution to air pollution?  More government regulation or market forces?

Some would say that the electric car is the answer because it has no tailpipe emission.  This is true if the car is charged on an electrical grid powered by hydroelectric dams or nuclear power plants.  But over 60% of all the electricity produced in the U.S. is from power plants that burn fossil fuels.  In most of the country, the tailpipe emissions from an electric car are simply moved to the smokestack.  The cost of these all-electric cars, at this point time, is out of reach of most of the driving public, and government subsidies are not a viable solution for any long-term market penetration. 

The solution could be from an "orphaned" technology.  An engine type known as a Stirling Cycle engine shows promise to drastically reduce tailpipe emissions and improve fuel efficiency.  In the 1980s, NASA was tasked by the Department of Energy to develop a more fuel-efficient alternative to the internal combustion engine.  The focus of this project was the Stirling cycle engine.  The scientists and engineers developed two types of twin Alpha-type Stirling engines for automotive application, the MOD I and the MOD ii.  Both of these engine designs performed better than predicted by computer models.  The tailpipe emissions were reduced by 90%, and fuel efficiency doubled.  Emissions were so low that there was no need for a catalytic converter.

Unlike the internal combustion engine, the Stirling engine is an external combustion engine.  Specifically, the combustion takes place outside the engine in a combustion chamber not all that different from a steam boiler in a steam turbine.  Because the combustion is at atmospheric pressure, the formation of NOx is dramatically reduced.

The NASA project ran into two problems that the technology of the 1980s could not resolve in a cost-effective method.  The first problem was that the engine took five to seven minutes to warm up to operating temperatures.  The second problem was that acceleration was sluggish with respect to production line vehicles already in the marketplace.

Fast-forward to the present day, and a new project, conducted by Texas A&M University, San Antonio and a company called Quantum Industrial Development Corporation has solved the problems that NASA encountered.  The problems are solved by employing the Stirling engine in a series hybrid configuration drivetrain.  A series hybrid design is basically an electric car with a range extender.  This patented design is called SHV™ Technology.  While the engine warms up, the driver runs the vehicle off the batteries and ultra-capacitors.  Once the engine is started, it turns a generator to provide electrical power to the batteries, wheel motors, and other vehicle components.  This all takes place without the driver noticing.

The project is still in the proof of concept stage while a mass production template is developed.  The estimated mass-produced cost of this type of vehicle is on par with other hybrids in the marketplace today.  Market forces suggest that sometime in the middle of the next decade, this type of vehicle drivetrain will be more common than the all-electric car, and smog-plagued cities like Los Angeles will begin to mitigate their air pollution problems...all without government regulation.