Array of Army Hybrid-Drive Vehicles Expanding Steadily.

Air-defense and missile-firing configurations of the Army's Humvee truck would be ideal candidates for a novel propulsion system known as hybrid-electric drive, officials said.

Customized trucks that carry anti-ballistic missile interceptors, such as the Army's theater high-altitude area air defense (THAAD), could benefit from this propulsion technology, which provides a quiet ride and generates additional electrical power, said Army and industry officials. Other specialty trucks where hybrid-electric propulsion would make sense, for the same reasons, are the Striker fire-support vehicle and the LOSAT (line-of-sight antitank) missile platform.

The Striker surveillance and targeting vehicle, built on a Humvee chassis, consists of advanced sensors, communications systems and a machine gun. The LOSAT kinetic-energy missile is used by light infantry units and also is mounted on a Humvee.

The Humvee is the Army's high-mobility multipurpose tactical wheeled vehicle.

All three special configurations of the Humvee are "possible users" of hybrid-electric propulsion, said Randall Gaeremick, deputy for systems acquisitions at the Army's TankAutomotive and Armaments Command.

Although hybrid-electric designs for passenger cars and mass transit buses have proved successful, officials noted that military vehicles present a host of unique demands.

Having a large electric-power source onboard would help meet the high energy demands of vehicles such as the THAAD, Striker or LOSAT platforms, said Ken Winters, vice president of PET Electronics, in Huntsville, Ala. The company developed a hybrid-electric propulsion system for the Humvee.

A hybrid propulsion unit includes a conventional engine, generator, a battery pack and electric-drive motors.

The Army currently is testing two hybrid-electric Humvees at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, in Maryland and at the Nevada Automotive Test Center. The plan is to build eight to 10 more prototypes by 2002, Gaeremick said at an industry conference in Monterey, Calif. A heavier truck, called the "extended-capacity" Humvee also is being tested with a hybrid-electric drive and could be available by 2004.

The new vehicles are funded under two separate programs. One is managed by the Humvee original manufacturer, the AM General Corp. PEI provides the power-train components that are needed to convert Humvees to hybrid-electric drive, Winters said in an interview. The other contract is with the Army's Tank-Automotive and Armament's Command's research and development center.

One of the two existing prototypes is a Humvee with a four-motor drive. An individual motor drives each wheel. "That gives it the highest possible performance we can get in that vehicle," said Winters. "It's very efficient for operations in sand, mud, because you get very good traction when the wheels are controlled individually, rather than going through a mechanical differential."

The second prototype is a utility Humvee, with a two-motor design. It has 30 percent less horsepower and uses a mechanical differential. "It doesn't have quite the mobility or the performance of the four-motor drive," said Winters. "But it is still better than the standard Humvee."

The next set of vehicles will be more sophisticated, he said. They will incorporate advanced features that the Army is considering for its next-generation Humvee, the A4 model. "We'll incorporate lessons learned from the testing from the first two vehicles," said Winters.

PEI officials hope to receive a production contract in mid-2004 or 2005.

Customized systems such as THAAD, Striker and LOSAT make fitting candidates for hybrid-electric Humvees, which come with a 75-kilowatt generator and large battery pack, he explained. "When you are not driving the vehicle, you can use that electric power for other applications."

If the Army deployed a mobile tactical operations center, for example, soldiers could draw power from the vehicle rather than bring a generator, Winters said. "It's a logistics savings. It allows you to plan on the move. It reduces logistics footprint and saves weight."

The unanswered question, however, is cost. "We really don't know yet," said Winters. Companies often are reluctant to divulge cost information about technologies that are still experimental.

Several industry sources said it would be reasonable to expect that a hybrid-electric vehicle would come with a 20 percent cost premium. Winters said that the savings from not needing an additional electric-power generator will not be enough. "This vehicle is too expensive to justify it only as a generator."

"The product is becoming more mature," Winters said. But, "there is a lot of design work left to do."

With a conventional engine, he said, a standard Humvee gets eight miles per gallon (driving on hard roads at convoy speeds). A hybrid vehicle would double the fuel economy to 16 miles per gallon.

For quiet operations, the vehicle can operate with electric power only. It can run 20 to 25 miles on electric power before it has to be recharged. The system can be recharged directly from the generator. In addition to the 75-kilowatt engine generator, there is a 24 kilowatt-hour lead-acid battery pack. "That's sufficient reserve power to drive the 20 to 25 mile range," said Winters. "If you are driving slower, you can get more range."

Operating as a hybrid, with a 24-gallon tank, a truck could travel 375 miles without refueling. A conventionally-powered vehicle, he said, will not make it past 275 miles.

The four-motor Humvee can accelerate from 0 to 50 miles per hour in 7 seconds, Winters said. A standard vehicle does it in 15 to 16 seconds.

A conventional Humvee can achieve a 60-percent grade at a speed of about 5.5 miles per hour, he noted. A hybrid vehicle can make the 60-percent grade at about 17 miles per hour. "All this reflects the increased horsepower," said Winters.

"Mobility [in the hybrid] is much better than in the standard Humvee," he said. The drives on the wheels are electronically controlled with software, "so we actually control the amount of drive torque going to each wheel independently. If we see that one of the wheels is starring to slip, we can reduce the torque to that wheel, depending on the soil conditions."

But hybrid-electric vehicles have been dismissed for not being rugged enough. Critics, for example, have cautioned against the hybrid drive's lack of endurance in harsh weather conditions.

Winters conceded that batteries freeze and stop working in extremely cold weather. "We designed this vehicle with an environmental chamber built around the batteries, so we heat and cool the batteries as necessary." The system, he said, will work within the minus-40 to plus-65 degree temperature range.

The vehicle and the batteries are sealed, so Winters expects that they will survive through 60 inches of water. "We haven't tested that yet. We don't see a problem with that in the production version." There are still some technical problems that have to be resolved, he said. "We have to go through the engineering process and finish the design and testing."

Winters hopes that, if the Army decides to fund a modernization program to upgrade old Humvees, it will consider using the hybridelectric drive. "We design a kit, with all the parts necessary to convert it from a standard drive to a hybrid vehicle. It's an assembly kit that can be inserted by the vehicle manufacturer or it can be done as an after-marker modification at [an Army] depot."

Convincing military customers that they should adopt this technology will rake time and "education," said Winters. "There is an educational process to allow potential users to understand how it's used in the field. It rakes a while to understand the differences" between the performance of conventional vehicles and hybrid-electric ones. "We have to go through that process so [military officials] understand how to write requirements," he said.

Armored Vehicle

A hybrid-electric armored vehicle, meanwhile, is being developed by the U.S. Army's National Automotive Center and United Defense LP (UDLP).

According to UDLP officials, the technology to make a hybrid armored combat vehicle will be available for mass production in about two years. The company built a hybrid-drive 15-ton prototype that was on display at the Army's winter convention in Fr. Lauderdale, Fla. The demonstrator was based on an M113 armored personnel-carrier chassis.

"The centerpiece technology of the demonstrator is the propulsion system, said Tim Balliett, from UDLP. In a published report, Balliett and colleague Max Dodd explained that the propulsion system consists of two 250 horsepower oil-cooled electric motors to drive the sprockets, a battery pack for energy storage and a diesel-powered engine-driven generator housed in the prime power unit (PPU).

"When the vehicle is being accelerated, power is provided simultaneously from the battery pack and from the engine-driven generator," he said. "When the vehicle is operating at normal speeds, the PPU is providing the average electric power needed to drive the track sprockets and auxiliary equipment."

The batteries provide transient power needs, such as accelerating, steering and climbing, and store the energy produced when the brakes are applied. "By using batteries to supply the transient peak power demands, the engine can be made much smaller than that required for a conventional combat vehicle," Balliett said.

The demonstrator is capable of about 10 miles of silent all-electric propulsion. If stationary, it could perform in an extended "silent-watch" mode for 24 hours or more depending on the equipment installed, he said. When stationary, the vehicle can generate about 200 kilowatts of electricity and function as an auxiliary power unit.

"Relative to the M113A3, its closest conventional cousin, this vehicle will produce nearly 500 horsepower in acceleration versus 275 horsepower for the M113A3," Dodd said. "This 500 burst horsepower is achieved by supplementing the conventional engine's generated power with the energy stored in the battery pack."

The hybrid-electric power train, he added, opens up more interior space for payload. Since there is no power pack in the front of the vehicle, the driver and commander sir roughly side by side, Dodd said.

This prototype vehicle, unlike the conventional M113, has a one-piece rubber "band" track, molded from rubber with bonded steel reinforcement. UDLP officials said this track, compared to conventional steel track, is more durable, weighs less, generates less heat and noise and provides a one-piece assembly, for easier maintenance.

"I think we will see something dramatic [in hybrid-electric technology] during the next three to seven years," said Robert G. Bohn, chairman of the Oshkosh Truck Corp., in Wisconsin. "The technology is working. ... Safety factors are starting to dissipate," he told the 2001 conference on tactical wheeled vehicles sponsored by the National Defense Industrial Association.

The Army plans to continue to experiment with hybrid-electric vehicles. Next fall, there are plans to introduce a hybrid-electric version of the heavy expanded-mobility tactical truck (HEMTT) made by Oshkosh.

John Stoddart, the company's vice president for government programs, said the vehicle will be unveiled in October during the Army's annual convention in Washington. The Oshkosh-designed drive, called ProPulse, will offer mote "tactical mobility" than other hybrid vehicles, Stoddard said.

Instead of batteries, he said, the system uses ultra-capacitors, which are high-performance electric energy storage devices. "Batteries are heavier, don't last as long, require mote maintenance," he said. The ProPulse drives will be introduced in the company's fire trucks during the next two years, he said.

Digital Environments Help Manage Vehicle Programs

On any given morning, the chief executive of Oshkosh Truck Corp. can look at a computer screen and see how many of the company's trucks are out of service.

Army Maj. Gen. John S. Caldwell Jr. says he is jealous.

"Unlike the Oshkosh CEO, [in the Army] we don't know how many of our vehicles are down on a particular day and why," Caldwell groused during a conference on military trucks in Monterey, Calif.

Computer chips onboard trucks and powerful information-processing software make it possible to monitor the status of the fleet around the world in real time, said Oshkosh chairman Robert G. Bohn.

But Caldwell, who runs the Army's Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command (TACOM), does not believe that technology alone is enough.

"In the Army, we have the technology" he said. "[But] we don't have the mindset."

TACOM manages 211 acquisition programs for the Army, worth about $6 billion, and is responsible for the logistics for 71 percent of the Army's mechanized units.

In Caldwell's opinion, TACOM needs to become more responsive to customer needs. 'We should not fool ourselves," he said. "Our customer expectations are too low!' He is concerned about enhancing the value of his agency to the larger Army. "It's time to move off the viewgraphs and get some work done," he said. "We need to make some adjustments, so TACOM can lead the Army transformation."

A first step in that direction is the adoption of a "digital framework for collaboration ... to find, manage and use information," Caldwell said. The command is in the process of building a "digital nervous system" for weapon system design.

Leading that effort is TACOM's National Automotive Center (NAC), which acts as a liaison between the Army and the commercial automotive industry.

"We've been working on a collaborative data environment for several years," said NAG Director Dennis Wend. The center developed a virtual design lab that links NAC engineers in Detroit with tank operators in Fort Knox. The technology makes it possible to have digital mathematical models of vehicles that look real, not "cartoonish," said Wend at the conference in Monterey.

The goal, he explained, is to achieve "visualization of design--from concept all the way to engineering changes, in a three-dimensional environment."

Last December, NAC awarded an $18 million two-year contract to Parametrics Technologies, makers of computer-aided design software. The contract covered 8,000 licenses of the Windchill collaborative Web-based software. "We can take any data, turn it into information. We can work on product development ... [and on] program management," said Wend.

Caldwell's wish for a TACOM-wide network that can provide instant information on the status of vehicles is not far-fetched, said Wend. NAC plans to incorporate new diagnostics technology into military vehicles-essentially computer chips that detect malfunctions in vehicle components and transmit that information to a user workstation. The next step, said Wend, is to standardize the technology Army-wide.

Software tools such as Windchill are helpful to manage information, said Mark Adams, president and chief executive officer of Portal Dynamics Inc., in Alexandria, Va. The company designs so-called "integrated data environments" (IDE) for various organizations.

IDE is Pentagon-speak for a Web portal that permits users to share and manipulate information about a product throughout its life cycle. The users include designers, workers who develop products, manufacturing operations, support agencies and suppliers.

An IDE, he explained, includes product information as well as transaction data such as invoicing and billing.

The Windchill software acquired by NAC specifically manages the product data, Adams said in an interview. "It's a robust tool for technical data product management." In an IDE, the data alone is not enough. To manipulate and manage data, the IDE relies on a so-called enterprise resource planning software tool, Adams said. Collectively, the data and the planning software form a collaborative work environment.

"TACOM is going in the direction of IDE," he said.

Web-Based 'Storefront'

IDEs are different from the old client-server or the mainframe application model, Adams explained. Military customers, for the most part, want their IDEs to be linked to their existing computer systems. They want a Web-based "storefront for users and manufacturers," said Adams.

Several Defense Department vehicle programs are using IDEs. Portal Dynamics received contracts to build networks for the Army's family of medium tactical vehicles (FMTV) and the M939 heavy truck The Marine Corps recently hired the company to build an IDE for its light armored vehicle program. The vehicle's producer, General Motors Canada, also is setting up an IDE to manage the company's internal processes for different product lines. Currently, Adams said, GM has 18 information systems that perform different functions.

The FMTV program manager, meanwhile, was "in a quandary," Adams said. "He had no visibility of the status of field-service reporting for vehicles around the world." Traditionally, the field-service reporting, which lists, the status of every vehicle in a particular area, is done on paper. The FMTV manufacturer, Stewart & Stevenson, would compile the reports and provide a summary to the program manager. "Generally, they were quite late," said Adams. "By the time the program manager got the information, it was weeks or months old."

The program office wanted an IDE that would "capture, aggregate and present the results of field-service reports," he said. Consequently, both the program manager and the manufacturer have "almost real-time information about the status of the fleet worldwide. They have a feel for which trucks are available for use."

Users of the IDE portal have profiles and passwords, Adams explained. Army staffers in the field enter the information into the network. The program manager thus can track, for example, maintenance trends throughout the fleet and determine which locations incur the most problems with vehicles and why.

The Army has multiple. computer systems that must be part of an IDE, he said. There is a system to handle maintenance jobs, another for supplies and product support, spare parts and financial data. "Generally, those systems don't talk to one another, never have, never were expected to," said Adams. "In the IDE concept, the expectation is that the FMTV program manager gets integrated maintenance information, supply information, financial data, training, status reporting" even though each item may come from separate information systems.

Before he became president of Portal Dynamics, Adams was in charge of the Defense Department's s "CALS" initiative. CALS - means computer-aided logistics support. During the past several years, he noted, rapid advances in commercial Web-based technologies have helped the CALS effort.

Weapon system developers in the government and in the private sector need this technology to be competitive, Adams said.

"The Defense Department is moving along a lot faster than it had [in the past]," he said. "When I had responsibility for the CALS program at the office of the secretary of defense, my team put the policy in place for the expectation of IDEs. There was a lot of concern from the acquisition community." In recent years, he said, "more technology has become available to make the expectation come to task."