Real Car propelled by compressed air.

[gjat]

Ran accross this link. It's a MDI car that runs 200 miles, up to 60 mph, on compressed air. The engineer points out that fueled engines run on air-gasses that is compressed by the heat of burning fuel. The engine runs by releasing the compressed air into the cylinder.

Utilize this with the KERS, and you'd have a super-efficient non-polluting urban vehicle.

http://www.flixxy.com/zero-pollution-automobile.htm

Edit to add a link. They signed a deal with TATA Motors (of India that came up with the $5k car) and will be producing CAT (compressed air technology) cars in 2009. The inventor is an automotive engineer for Formula 1 race cars and has been doing this for decades. http://zeropollutionmotors.us/

[BobSch]

I better not let LOML see this. She has been known to make disparaging remarks about gas. Don't know why...

[bradley_osu]

That's interesting. What compresses the air in the first place? Electricity and an air compressor I'm guessing? My question of course being if we used electricity to compress air to then power the car wouldn't it be more efficient to just use electricity to power the car. For that matter since we probably burned fossil fuels to make the electricity... you see where I'm going? Of course, power plants use the energy from burning fuel much more efficiently so you are gaining that efficiency.

The video also makes the claim of the possibility of perpetual motion which of course violates the laws of thermodynamics. The idea that they have a generator that runs on compressed air which would then compress air and then run the generator is unfortunately absurd, there is loss in any system. If that worked then you could hook a generator up to itself and it would continually spin... which is not the case.

It's an interesting concept but you have to look at the whole picture to determine how energy efficient it is. What would be interesting is if they could come up with a way to adapt internal combustion engines to run on compressed air. Then at least we would be able to apply the increased efficiency from a powerplant to work in cars people already have today therefore allowing for a smaller investment and increased efficiency

[dkhoward]

TO get any kind of capacity in a car sized storage tank, its going to use really high pressures. How much is the compressor gonna cost that will do those kinds of pressures and include a drying system to remove the moisture that could be a MAJOR problem. I know from my fire fighting career, that a multi-stage compressor that will do 4500 psi on a regular basis was very expensive. I doubt very seriously that you are going to recharge this think with you HF pancake compressor

[LCHIEN]

we had extensive discussions on this last July and then again in November


http://www.bt3central.com/showthread...ressed+air+car


http://www.bt3central.com/showthread...ressed+air+car