Clear Air Act Of 1970 Essay

The Clear Air Act of 1970 gave the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the ability to regulate motor vehicle pollution. As a result, the EPA has been implementing regulatory and control policies to reduce pollution ever since [4]. The car industry has been forced to respond to the regulations imposed by the EPA with different solutions to reduce emissions. In 1975, the first-generation catalytic converters were introduced as a response to the Clean Air Act of 1970. The catalytic converters decreased the emissions of hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide of the vehicles made after 1975 and have since been improved to [5]. The major milestone in vehicle emission control technology came when electric vehicles, fuel cell, and hybrid vehicle emerged into the market in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. One of the most effective ways the design engineers behind the early hybrid

According to Boretti, the flywheel mechanical system is ideally more efficient than the electrical battery system because it involves a fewer number of energy conversions [6]. Boretti states that “transforming energy from one form to another inevitably introduces significant losses.” This can more easily be understood through relating energy to water and the transforming of energy to the transferring of water from one container to another. When one is transferring water from one sized pitcher to another, often, some of the water is lost during the process. Likewise, when energy is converted from one form of energy to another, energy is lost along the way. Therefore, the most efficient system for recovering kinetic energy is ideally the one that converts the form of energy the least amount of times. Figure 1 demonstrates the mechanism of how the electric motor switches to become a generator to store electric energy into the