Ain't no free lunch. I could figure out the volume of tank required to do this and the amount of power required to pump it up, etc. etc. Common sense says why waste the time. If 25 HP and limited range is acceptable, just use a tiny gasoline engine/battery hybrid such as already available. At that power level, 100 MPG should be no problem, plus it can run on ethanol made from crabgrass mush, or biodiesel recovered from the MacDonald's grease tank.
A 4500 PSI air tank will in fact impersonate a rocket engine if the cap gets knocked off. Probably no worse than a gasoline explosion in total damage, just that it will kill somebody in the next county instead of at the wreck site.
Reminds me of something that was seriously suggested in a Popular Mechanics magazine about 30 years ago. Guy wanted to run a pipe to the bottom of the ocean where the pressure is very high, put a turbine in the middle of it, and generate power from the water that would rush up the pipe to the relatively low pressure at the surface.
Everybody should be required to study Mechanical Engineering for a minimum of 2 years before being allowed to even talk about alternate technologies.
Absolutely! (BSME UT Austin 1979)Its amazing how many hare-brained ideas are accepted before a hard headed engineer reminds them of the facts of life.
which 2 years?