SUSTAINABILITY THROUGH MATERIALS LONGEVITY
Definition of Immortal car: Immortal car is a car, which, due to advanced materials used to construct it, survives its typical user under regular maintainance and normal life-time of a common human being.
We are aware the project is limited by thermodynamics keeping low entropy paid by another energy. This energy in the project will be simple quantified by its overall cost. Our hypothesis is the immortal car is not so energy consuming project as this project of Ship of Theseus.
Analogy to the same thinking is high quality household electric equipment which helps to sava not only money in life-time time scale but also contributes to lowering our environemtnal impacts and therefore contibutes to sustainability in materials usage. If one buyes relatively expensive vacuum cleaner, normally he or she is able to pay reparation cost 10-20% to avoid another relatively expensive purchase. With cheap equipment such a service cost is always meaningful and leads to meterial disposal. Typical life-time of such devices is 5-10 years but only small fraction of materials used for equipment failed to provide a reliable product functionality. It is often small piece of wire or tiny amount of insulation much cheaper than the price of labour of qualified technic. Thus cheap things never get repaired and go to landfil or so.
This project is about to say that buying cheap thing is not the best for your pocket neither our planet.
To demonestrate this we did not choose a daily life object like washing machine, but we have chosen something more emotional to attract the attention of broader laic community. Our object to investigate this is thus a luxury car Jaguar XJ. Our research object was gifted us by a colleague of us, scientist in the field of polymer.
Here, we want to investigate if the total life-cycle analysis of this object compared to LCA of similar cars like luxury models of common producers (with price in the range of 40-60 kGBP as new one) will have the same CO2 footprint and wheather the economy of such cars would give a sence for common people.
Further controversion is by selecting the car which by far most of current population will consider not highly eco-friendly. Heavy car with 2.7 liter diesel engine taking like 4-5 gallons of oil per 100 miles. Want to know how this experiment finish? Follow our project Instagram acount as this project more applied reaserach project which we do on Sundays only. Meaning no cost for the university. This is the principle for the whole project. We will not spent single GBP to buy any spare parts. We would like to use the Jaguar community advices and parthenrships with producers of high quality equipment which might share our idea of materials with high longevity for exceptional sustaibility in terms of both environemental and economy aspects.
Teaching aspects
We want to take the advantage of having a car to facilitat excurion on industrials sites. This will lead to innovation of subject Polymer production. The ain is to visit plants which generate major plastics and rubber in Europe withing several years, to bring the subject uptodate with modern technologies.
Promo activity
We will used this car to promote material oriented study programs of UCT, e.g. going to fairs focused on high school students.
Shortly:
By this project we want to promote high-tec materials which enable manufacture of durable objects of any kind thus contributing to more sustainable life-style.
For next 20 years we want to investigate degradation of the best materials in order to see what are critical components of this car. However, we are convinced that the key components like all-aluminium boda and chassis, space high-tec diesel engine and automatic gear guarantte mechanical viability of the car for almost unlimited time. Together with high quality of interior materials and timelss desgn, this car feels much younger than it currently is.
The scientific output of the project will be open data on parts charcterization with time and on-line logbook with CO2 footprint calculation based on used diesel fuel for the whole timeframe of the project. Economy of the operation of such car will be also studied and compared with that of convential car from common automotive production.
Do you want to understand high-tec materials, from which Immortal Car was constructed?
Understand in great detail to advanced metals, ceramics, glass, plastics, rubbers & composites.
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Where to see Immortal Car and team:
Gaudeamus Fair of Study programms, Brno, 19.-22.11.2024
Gaudeamus Fair of Study programms, Praha, 2025
Scientific consultant team:
- expert in the field of polymers in automotive and polymer degradation (ORCID)
- expert in the field of metals in automotive and metal corrosion (ORCID)
- expert in the field of glass and ceramic in automotive (ORCID)
Project partners (financial or material support, long-term collaboration under individual frame, free technical consultations):
THANK YOU!
