Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 3
Construction of Transportation Means
Construction is the oldest field of work in the history of transportation means. In
the Stone Age, people constructed carriages and ships from wood. Since the
Industrial Revolution steel has gained the leading role in construction. Today,
there is a broad range of literature and experiences are nearly unlimited for
vehicle, airplane, and ship construction. For this reason, the main aspect of the
current development in construction is to find the optimal path for decreasing of
fuel consumption and exhaust gas emissions.
3.1 Road Vehicles
The first vehicles were powered by steam engines in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, and were followed by gasoline and diesel fuel-powered internal com-
bustion engines from the beginning of the twentieth century. The first efforts to
save fuel came after the Second World War, but the serious saving of fuel began
after the first oil crisis in 1973 [ 1 ]. Since then, manufacturers have been developing
vehicles that are more and more fuel efficient.
According to the definition of ISO 3833:1977, a motor vehicle is a self-pro-
pelled, wheeled transportation mean for operation on roads [ 2 ]. Nowadays, there
are more than 1 billion road vehicles, including station wagons, and light and
heavy duty trucks in the world. More than half of them are cars, but the proportion
of commercial vehicles, particularly of heavy duty vehicles (HDVs), is rapidly
rising. The USA had the first largest and China had the second largest fleet of
motor vehicles with 239.8 and 78 million pieces in 2010 [ 3 ].
The amount of fuel used in several countries of the world is quite uneven and
depends on the number, the age and the technical quality of vehicles, the average
distances traveled, the cost of fuel, and the personal incomes of people. The
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