To: Gorjus
A couple of companies are pursuing a car engine that operates on compressed air...seems like a good solution for congested cities to run their fleet of buses and city cars. I read somewhere that Mexico city has ordered thousands.
http://auto.howstuffworks.com/air-car1.htm
The car is in production and is seen as solution to localized pollution problems (such as in doors in industrial settings, fork lifts and such.)
http://www.theaircar.com/faq.html
72 posted on
08/31/2006 8:37:35 AM PDT by
aligncare
(In warfare, the only moral stance is to win.)
To: aligncare
Haven't had a chance to look at this yet, but the energy efficiency of cold air is just horrible. We can't even use it to start a jet engine once, not with reasonable size bottles.
I suppose with a zillion psi or so you could store enough energy to be useful - but that would make one heck of a bomb, or cut through just about anything if it ever developed a leak.
My take on it is that cold air (meaning compressed, but not combusted for power) becomes dangerous before it becomes useful as a power source. Of course, with a low enough horsepower requirement, you can make a lot of things work. But I wonder if an equivalently sized gasoline/diesel engine might not be better overall for pollution and fuel use, once you figure in the need to have some way to compress that air in the first place.
83 posted on
08/31/2006 2:45:19 PM PDT by
Gorjus
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