A group of Marquette students led by College of Engineering Professor George Corliss were on hand at the Annual Green Energy Summit and Exposition this month to showcase the Department of Public Safety’s eLIMO, just a year after its original debut.
Corliss said the eLIMO, an all-electric Ford E-350 van, was received with a “mild curiosity” at the event this year, as this was the eLIMO’s second appearance. Besides showing off the eLIMO and its functions, Corliss also wanted to promote Marquette to prospective students and businesses in the community.
“(We wanted to) show the flag,” Corliss said. “We want people in the community, whether industry, prospective students or their parents to think well of Marquette.”
This year’s appearance was special as the eLIMO is now in use on campus, albeit with limited service.
Sgt. Dan Kolosovsky, head of student safety programs at DPS, sees the vehicle as a symbol of student innovation, but it’s still a work in progress. It averages a run time of five hours, and aside from lacking a working air conditioning/heating unit — which was removed in the outfitting process — it functions almost as well as a regular LIMO.
“Our use of the vehicle has been limited because of these (outfitting) issues, but it is gradually beginning to fit our needs,” Kolosovsky said. “The vehicle has also been displayed at various green conferences as well as used by the College of Engineering as an excellent example of student ingenuity and initiative.”
As for the future of the current LIMO fleet, it’s too soon to tell if electric power will be the new standard.
“Although this would be great, switching over the LIMO fleet to these vehicles at this time would be cost-prohibitive,” Kolosovsky said. “We would also need to see just how this experimental vehicle does over time before committing to a move such as this.”
Justin Thompto, a 2011 graduate of the College of Engineering, wasn’t present at the summit, but he was an integral part of the design team for
the eLIMO project last year. Today, Thompto works as an electrical engineer at Digalog Systems Inc., but he considers his time working on the eLIMO one of the larger parts of his Marquette experience.
“The eLIMO project was considered one of Marquette’s high profile projects,” Thompto said. “We had real deadlines, real goals and a whole lot of added responsibility in order to produce a product that was actually going to be used.”
Thompto recalls working late nights, weekends and frequently off-campus to build the eLIMO.
“We were all very dedicated to it,” Thompto said. “We worked late hours, on weekends, frequently went off-campus to do work and the hard work paid off. I’ve also helped out since graduation to get the van reintegrated into service with DPS.”
