Posted on 02/22/2005 3:21:25 PM PST by goldstategop
These are no ordinary cars. Power comes from fresh air stored in reinforced carbon-fiber tanks beneath the chassis. Air is compressed to 4,500 pounds per square inch — about 150 times the pressure of the typical car tire. The air is fed into four cylinders where it expands, driving specially designed pistons. About 25 horsepower is generated.
Though technical problems are being worked out, company officials say the car is capable of 70 mph and a 120-mile range under normal city conditions, performance that is comparable to electric cars.
Critics say the car has had trouble living up to its range projections. But company officials say they are trying to overcome that by warming the stored air.
Recharging the onboard tanks takes about four hours using the car's small compressor, which can be plugged into any wall outlet. Gas stations equipped with special air pumps can replenish the tanks in about three minutes. Company officials say the oil only needs to be changed every 31,000 miles.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
For France, this is a good idea, if spent nuclear fuel isn't a worry. France supplies slightly more that 75% of it's electricity through nuclear power.
If these guys were serious about production, and weren't bilking their foreign investors for startup capital, they wouldn't even consider France as the location for a car production line. Adding that much inefficiency to the bottom line cost of a car due to French labor laws, French labor unions, and well, France, will make the car too expensive to compete. Then again, greenies may well find the 30% "Made in France" hidden surcharge a romantic gesture.
Oxygen Welding Regulators can take it from 4000 to around 10 psig. I am assuming you could do the same thing with Air. In either event, I am sure they'd put a blowoff valve on there if they did their homework.
I've never had an Oxygen regulator take a dump on me. Usually it's the acetylene egulators that die on torches because acetylene (also called ethyne) is stored as a dissolved gas in acetone.
I see an efficiency problem how can it come close to burning primary energy ? Let's see a air compressor charging the tanks then the losses occurred in the drive Assembly.Old idea BTW the railroads had a small yard engine called a thermos jug basically a air tank connected to a piston drive motor for moving the cars around.
Sorry, folks, this ain't a new idea. The sugar plants that used to be all over Colorado used compressed air locomotives to move cars of beets around. They had a large tank and pumped on it all night to get 8 hours of use the next day.
Also, the chill effect is only at the point of expansion which is why your air drill gets cold, but the hose doesn't.
I think we should be looking at external combustion too. Do a little research on Abner Doble and his cars.
The only place I've seen compressed air work well for cars is in Russia. There some trucks operating in Siberia use compressed air to turn over the engine instead of a battery and a starter motor. Batteries don't work well at 40 degrees below zero, but the compressed air starters work just fine in the super cold air.
Regulators that is. Someday, I swear I'll learn how to type properly.
I had a similar idea.
My car runs off of hot air and lies. Basically you tie a democrat up in the trunk and hook a lie detector to him. Convert the needle swings to power the transmission. While the hot air feels a balloon, reducing the weight of the car.
With a really serious democrat in the trunk you should be able to go airborne.
The typical French motor vehicle might have knee-pads instead of rubber tires, little white flags in place of indicator lights...and run on the power of gaseous exudate created from the exretia of cheese-eating surrender monkeys?
It could happen!!!! Air-compression engines are WW3 in a bottle, I tell ya! ;)
What city can you swoosh at 70 mph? What mormal city conditions? Like down the hill?
Like what technical problems? How many people needed to push it? Back to the Fn future!
Have any steam engines capable of transporting themselves over land ever been designed to run on that sort of pressure? I was pretty sure they were quite a bit higher than that. Not two whole orders of magnitude (like this compressed-air bomb/car) but a lot more than 35-40.
Though that brings up another interesting point: have any land steam engines ever been designed to use a condensor to generate below-atmospheric pressure on the low-pressure side of the drive piston? I know the first steam engines operated entirely below atmospheric, but those were huge things that didn't generate enough power to move their own weight.
It wouldn't be like a missile. It would be a missile.
A few years ago, I was lucky(?) enough to see first hand what happens when the neck of a full argon tank gets knocked off. The driver of the delivery van left the tank standing near the edge of the lift on the van while he pulled closer to the delivery dock. I still don't know what he was thinking; he was new, and we never saw him again after. The movement of the van tipped it over, and the tank and hand truck fell off the lift over the edge and the top of the tank hit the pavement at almost 45°. The valve broke clean off and the tank launched itself. When the smoke and dust cleared, we saw it had punched a hole through the top of the van box, "flew" about another 100 yards, and left an impressive trench in the vacant lot down the street.
Ever since, I don't like driving my car around with even one of the small CO2 tanks for the MIG in the trunk. There's no way I'm buying a car with something like that built in.
Make mine BioDiesel. It works. Today.
Oh, and where's my Diesel Harley?
Turbines on ship's engines run on high pressure steam also. The only problem is you need to heat the water, which requires another energy source.
What would you call an engine in which the working fluid was burned, but not in the piston? Aside from a turbojet. What would a reciprocating version of the concept be called?
In the fire service we use 4500psi in aluminum carbon wrapped cylinders for self contained breathing apparatus. A single cylinder 8" by 22" holds enough air for 45 min - 1 hour depending on your degree of exertion. The cylinders are tough, withstanding high temperatures and shock loads. They are also very expensive at $2400.00 each. We have a big honking 220V 3 phase compressor that can fill a bottle in about ten minutes (these bottles have to be filled slowly due to heat build up). The lights dim for blocks around when it is turned on, so I have serious questions weather this car will save any energy.
No, that's the product of my evil human engineering plant.
Considering that a SCUBA tank at 3100psi holds 80-120 cubic feet of air, I would venture to say that tanks big enough to generate 25 ponies for longer than 5 minutes would be very large.
Unless there is some useful way of harnessing the heat given off in compression, the system is going to be horrendously inefficient.
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