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Madison, Wisconsin—April 5, 2023—Kelly Senecal, Co-Founder of Convergent Science and Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford, will push for alternative fuels to be part of future climate policy during an upcoming keynote address. Senecal will speak to industry experts, academics, and government researchers at SAE International’s 2023 World Congress Experience (WCX), April 18–20 in Detroit.
Combustion engine vehicles running on alternative fuels have the potential to be low carbon or even carbon neutral, particularly if they are hybridized. According to Senecal, policies that ban internal combustion engines in the coming decades are excluding a key technology that could accelerate the transition to sustainable transportation.
“Well-intentioned laws aimed at combating climate change are in reality doing more harm than good,” says Senecal. “Electric vehicles are a great technology for certain applications and geographical regions, but they face their own sustainability issues: dirty energy grids, scarce resources for manufacturing batteries, the human and environmental impacts of mining those resources, and higher consumer costs, to name a few.”
Carbon-free and carbon-neutral fuels can fill in the gaps, Senecal claims, by helping to decarbonize existing vehicle fleets, reducing the battery resource burden, and providing a clean alternative solution in regions where electric grids are still heavily reliant on fossil fuels.
This idea is already gaining traction, Senecal says, pointing to recent events in Europe. At the end of March, the European Commision struck a deal with Germany that will allow the sale of combustion engine vehicles running on synthetic e-fuels even after the EU’s zero-emission vehicle policy takes effect in 2035.
“This deal demonstrates that alternative fuels are not only viable, but can be an integral component of future sustainable transportation,” says Senecal. “Having a diverse set of tools at our disposal to tackle transport sector emissions only increases our chances of success.”
During his WCX keynote address on April 19, Senecal will elaborate on how diversity in transportation technologies can help us achieve carbon-neutrality and discuss how engineering software can facilitate the transition. Convergent Science is the creator of the computational fluid dynamics software package CONVERGE, which engineers use to design a range of transport technologies, including battery packs and electric motors for electric vehicles and engines that run on alternative fuels.
Headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin, Convergent Science is a global leader in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software. Our mission is to enable our customers to perform revolutionary CFD simulations by creating accurate, versatile, user-friendly software and providing unparalleled support.
Our flagship product, CONVERGE, is an innovative CFD software that eliminates the grid generation bottleneck through autonomous meshing and features a suite of advanced physical models, fully coupled detailed chemistry, and the ability to easily accommodate moving geometries. CONVERGE is revolutionizing the CFD industry and shifting the paradigm toward predictive CFD.
For more information about Convergent Science, please visit convergecfd.com.
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