air powered car

[devonwoody]

looking at my petrol expenses, £27 feb, 32 march, 38 april, 42 today may.

I need one of these, air is free isnt it?

http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/ne ... pt/4217016

 

[Blister]

Air Cars are scheduled to hit Indian streets in August of 2008.

Read more: World's First Air-Powered Car: Zero Emissions by Next Summer - Popular Mechanics


Did it ever happen ?

 

[thomvic]

http://johnharding.com/2011/01/26/minicat-the-air-powered-car/

Slightly more up to date but no firm date for release.

Air is free but not the power to compress and deliver it.

Richard

 

[Shrubby]

google ' woodgas.nl '
Revisiting technology widely used during WW2
start saving those offcuts
Matt

 

[Chataigner]

As for an air powered car being zero emissions, that's rubbish - using electricity to charge it just moves the emissions from the street to the power station.

 

[mailee]

OH God NO! that will mean the government WILL tax the air we breathe! :roll:

 

[wobblycogs]

An air powered car could cut emissions it just depends how the electricity at the power station is produced. If it's a wind farm generating the electricity to run the compressors then the car truly is zero emission. A coal power station with carbon capture would mean the car could be considered zero emission too - there's no way you could capture the carbon from every individual car but from a few power stations (few in relation to the number of cars anyway) it may be possible.

Distributed power generation, which is what we basically have with cars are the minute, has a lot to be said for it but it's much more difficult to de-carbonize it because it requires millions of people to change what they are doing. Centralized power generation if correctly incentivised should be able to go green fairly quickly.

 

[Chataigner]

Good point about centralised power generation being POTENTIALLY greener. However, wind pôwer can only ever be a secondary source, imagine a cold day in deccember and then the wind drops!

Seriously, wind power, while a useful supplement, takes such a vast area, around 100 square miles of generators to replace one 3000MW fossil fuel station like Drax or Eggboro, it can never be a major contributor. Wave power however.... Around 200kW per metre of atlantic coast I saw quoted recently for a pilot project anchored well offshore.

 

[wobblycogs]

Ah, I wasn't saying I support wind power. As far as I can see it's damn near pointless. I was just holding it up as an example of a way we could generate carbon free electricity.

While unpopular, if the choice was up to me, I'd throw tons of money into R+D of nuclear power. The current best nuclear power station design is pretty safe and produces a lot of power for a small footprint. There are so many better designs out there though some of which produce no long lived nuclear waste (short lived waste will always be produced but that can be easily handled). I can't honestly see how we could produce all our power from renewable sources alone.

 

[knappers]

I was reading an article at the weekend on how it's about time we had a significant global push towards trying to crack nuclear fusion, rather than wasting time and effort on renewable energy like wind and wave power.
As you say, lots more can be done with fission yet, also. The arguments against nuclear power caused by the recent problems in Japan are using an old design, lax maintenance and safety standards and a highly volatile tectonic environment to say they are not safe full stop... doesn't stack up to me.

Si.

 

[wobblycogs]

I follow fusion research pretty closely, there's not doubt the area is drastically underfunded but even if it was better funded I think we are still a long way from having something that works. The ITER http://www.iter.org/ website explains most of the problems they are currently facing. It looks like they have a pretty good handle on the actual fusion side of things now. The current problems seem to be more in the materials the reaction chamber will be made from and how to generate the tritium required for fusion. It should be possible from neutron capture by lithium but it's never been done on this sort of scale.

Most people don't seem to realize that a fusion reactor will produce some fairly high level nuclear waste. The reaction chamber will be constantly exposed to a high neutron flux which will make it radioactive. Correct choice of materials will reduce the problem but we will still have to deal with it.

Bill Gates it currently funding a very clever reactor design called a travelling wave reactor: http://gigaom.com/cleantech/terrapower-how-the-travelling-wave-nuclear-reactor-works/. If it works it promises an end to high level nuclear waste.

 

[bosshogg]

This is the car your all talking about, the Tata Nano, powered by the Compressed Air Engine (CAE) and claimes some 100 + mpg, that's hydro-carbons, no power stations involved, unless you include any energy generated in it's manufacturing.

The concept is similar to the Hybrid cars currently available, but instead of generating and storing electricity in large battery banks for bursts of inertia, air is compressed and stored in a compressed gas tank and used for these bursts of inertia.
The concept is not new in fact it has been around for a couple of centuries, in the form of pneumatic locomotive engines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_motor it doesn't depend on the wind blowing, has no other emissions apart from some moisture (anyone who has worked with compressed air will relate to that) further, no oil is used in the engine therefore it is entirely hydro-carbon free
The technology in this instance, has been developed in France by Motor Development International (MDI) Angelo Di Pietro (Engineair Pty Ltd) in Australia has developed a more radical holistic approach insomuch as he has developed small rotary compressed air engines, one for each wheel, which reduces the overall energy consumption to go from A - B and the working parts involved in a, let's say car...anyone who is really interested, drop me a PM and I can give you some further information...bosshogg MSc. Advanced Sustainability for the Built Environment. :evil:

 

[Chataigner]

I was reading an article at the weekend on how it's about time we had a significant global push towards trying to crack nuclear fusion, rather than wasting time and effort on renewable energy like wind and wave power.
As you say, lots more can be done with fission yet, also. The arguments against nuclear power caused by the recent problems in Japan are using an old design, lax maintenance and safety standards and a highly volatile tectonic environment to say they are not safe full stop... doesn't stack up to me.

Si.

Oh yes, I do agree. Fusion, or even fission which has a very good track record in the vast majority of cases. Those who point to accidents at nuclear power stations compared to fossil fuel stations forget to include the terrible accident rate in coal mining and oil production/transport.

Nuclear is not trouble free, but at least is no worse, produces no greenhouse gasses and is essentially limitless.

 

[wobblycogs]

From a radiation perspective coal fuelled power stations are actually a lot worse than the nuclear power stations: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste. The trouble with statements like these though are that we are comparing two very low figures and the statement doesn't indicate that. The real difference, of course, is that when a nuclear plant releases radiation it tends to do it all in one go.

When comparing coal and nuclear power we really should look at the number of deaths caused by respiratory diseases caused by the the fine particulate matter shot out of the chimneys of coal fired power stations. I saw some estimated figures once and was shocked how many people are affected.

 

[Benchwayze]

Please don't get started on Wind Power.
Denmark have ditched the concept as non-viable and costing more than they put back into the grid. If these eyesores were efficient, there wouldn't be so many needed. That's seems logical to me. Why the powers that be can't see it I just don't know.

Running engines on compressed air is feasible. We used to test torpedo engines on the trestles, using air, but we had an unlimited supply line. The 'air vessel' on a torpedo was pressurised to 3000 lbs per square inch (If I recall correctly)

John

 

[wobblycogs]

Efficiency isn't really the problem, modern turbines are now very good at extracting energy from the wind. The problem is that there just isn't very much energy in the wind - at least not when compared to how much energy we use - so we need to build an enormous number of turbines to satisfy even a tiny percentage of the demand.

The real problem though is that the vast majority of people think our energy needs are just the electricity we use and that if we make that "green" everything will be fine. Electricity accounts for only a small fraction of the power we actually use though, heating and transport are much bigger users of power. When all power use is factored in it becomes clear that wind can only ever bit a bit player at best.

If I were king... I would build wind turbines everywhere they would pay back their energy cost in 1/4 the lifetime of the turbine. In fact I would make probably make it illegal to build a turbine that didn't meet that requirement. That would mean that we would always be working towards the end goal of clean power and not dotting the landscape with pointless, feel good, windmills. I'm currently thinking of the Green Park windmill that you can see from the M4 which has to be the most piece of engineering ever.

 

[Benchwayze]

Cogs,

I'd really like to reply in full to this. But it's a Political lukewarm spud, so I will leave it be.

John :wink:

 

[Jonzjob]

Wind turbines, carbon free??? Since when has a couple of thousand tons of concrete been carbon free. Cement production is one of the biggest carbon producers there is and each of these 'carbon free' monstrosities sits on that much concrete..

A mate of mine had the answer. He modified his estate car to run on methane and kept chickens in the back, one big bird in particular was really good at producing the poo needed for the methane production.

He was on his way to work one morning and the car was going slower than normal and eventually stopped. He couldn't find out what the problem was so he called out the RAC. The bloke arrived and looked around and eventually found the problem. He looked very sad apparently and said that it was a bad problem and he told my mate that the reason he'd stopped was because the enginre was being starved of methane because of a mechanical problem. It turned out that his big 'en had gone!!

 

[Tusses]

you could always make your own !

http://woodgears.ca/air_engine/index.html

 

[Digit]

To return to the original point, all internal combustion engines are air powered, the fuel is only there to expand the air.

Roy.