Air-powered cars..... Re: attn PV if he's still around.

Oh gawd...not running cars on 100% efficient air again! You've discovered a perpetual motion machine...no energy losses. Won't that dumb idea ever die?? I think you would have a better chance at powering cars with bovine produced methane!

Back to the Future, on the AMC channel.The Flux Capacitor. cuhulin

On the web, The Flux Capacitor

You can make your own, or buy a replica. cuhulin

Oh gawd...not running cars on 100% efficient air again! You've discovered a perpetual motion machine...no energy losses. Won't that dumb idea ever die?? I think you would have a better chance at powering cars with bovine produced methane!

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The issue is not perpetual motion, but 100% energy CONVERSION, which has nothing to do with PM.

This is indeed what happens electrically -- motors are near 100% efficient.

But NOT thermodynamically. It seems air is a kind of hybrid (heh) mechanical/thermodynamic system, with more losses than I initially realized, in my previous gushing.....

The Q is: are the inefficiencies of the air car doomed to be the same as those of a gas engine??

Heh, the French guy apparently dudn't think so.

Using air for bulk energy storage comes up periodically, and there are major utility installations. The end-to-end efficiency isn't great in automobile-sized systems, where it is difficult to keep the compressed air hot. Transportation use of compressed air for propulsion was soon eclipsed by the internal combustion engine, especially the diesel engine.

Joe Gwinn

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Come on - compressing air to power a car is not anywhere close to 100% efficient. Think about the entire process. And consider the physical container needed to hold compressed air needed to power a car 200 miles. You would need a tractor and trailer following the car. The french guy's idea has been around for quite a while. It's been around for so long I wonder if he is still alive or whether this nonsense simply lives on as an urban legend. Snake oil solutions like that one come out every time we get a runup in gasoline prices.

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Or a scare about pollution. First time something like this got to the hardware stage in my lifetime was during the big pollution scares of the '70s, it was going to do away with smog in the cities. Have some really old "horseless carriage" engineering books from the 1890s where some outfits were looking at compressed air to run their buggies, don't know if they actually got to anything more than prototypes. Compresssing and storing air for portable power purposes really sucks, it's an inefficient process and the energy density is really, REALLY low. Niche applications only, like mining locomotives and pneumatic tools. You've got the same losses in compressing hydrogen, too, which not many have taken into account when running their fantasy cars on water...

Stan

Not way too long ago in China, they had city buses with big bags on top of those buses.They had natural gas inside of those bags for the bus engines to run on.They could go about thirty miles.I once read about that in a National Geographic magazine.

Switzerland had some flywheel powered city buses.At some of the bus stops, a cantilever arm would reach up and make contact with some electric wires, sort of like old fashioned trolley cars.That would rev up an electric motor which reved up the flywheel in the buses. cuhulin

On the web, if you want to use

Switzerland Flywheel Buses

Also, China Natural Gas Bag Buses cuhulin

Use an electric space heater.

Then there is gasline (& mileage) from water .... Remember Jethro Bodine .. and the electric truck conversion.

Come on - compressing air to power a car is not anywhere close to 100% efficient. Think about the entire process.

******I agree wholeheartedly

And consider the physical container needed to hold compressed air needed to power a car 200 miles. You would need a tractor and trailer following the car.

******You need not have such storage. You could have a hybrid, using a small high efficiency turbine, or high efficiency IC engine. Still, what is there to gain?

If you are going to compress the air, you ARE going to heat it, and you need to conserve the heat. An insulated high pressure tank might manage this.

But you need to go through the whole process, and see what the end product might yield in terms of efficiency.

You could also run the car on hydraulic motors, but that has losses from heat, viscosity and/or "friction", etc.

In most of these systems, some of the problems can be solved, and others optimized. We need some nutter PhD to make a theoretical efficiency analysis of these systems, and then pick one and jump on board.

We are just bumblefarting around.

If you are foolish enough to think compressed air will have enough energy to power a car for any distance, you should at least look into steam powered cars using a steam/water high pressure tank like they used in yard locomotives. They would be charged off the boiler on the facility and usually lasted for at least a half a day.

John

I have a pipe-dream of using one of those "instant heat" water heaters, as a boiler, to drive some kind of positive displacement turbine (like a retired blower), and a car radiator to condense the cool steam and reuse the water.

I wonder if enything like that could be made feasible?

Thanks, Rich

This presupposes, I guess, that you are going to charge your vehicle with air or steam at some point and try to make it to the next filling point using that charge only. I can't see that this would be a viable system

============ In the US this may well be the case, however Europe is not standing still. The MPG numbers in the following articles are miles per *IMPERIAL* gallon and must be converted to US MPG. See

and/or FWIW

317 MPG Imperial = 317 * 0.833 = 264 MPG US 85.6 MPG Imp = 71.3 MPG US 80.7 MPG Imp = 67.2 MPG US

That?s VW?s 21st-century streamliner, the XL1, honed not for speed but to achieve an astonishing 313mpg.

and these production cars are available at dealers showrooms in the UK. The reason these cars are not available in the US is a separate thread.

-- Unka George (George McDuffee) .............................. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. L. P. Hartley (1895-1972), British author. The Go-Between, Prologue (1953).

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Notice they are all bar the hybrid, Diesels.

Even 10 years or more ago the Citroen ZX Turbo Diesel (1.9litre/100bhp ish) I ran would return 55mpg (Imperial Gallon) just about no matter how it was driven.

I did like that car, and next family car we have will certainly be a diesel again. Especially now petrol here is 1.30+ gbp/litre.

Wayne....

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Those are impressive numbers. I moved to the US from Europe just

10 years ago. At that time, the smaller diesels were getting great economy. These seem to be even better.

The politic here seems to be, again, to bumblefart around, make big talk, do little.

Diesel would solve some of our problems of petroleum dependency since synthetic diesel is no trouble to make. But you have noticed the reluctance of the American system, blamed on the EPA I guess, to embrace more diesel vehicles.

A mate of mine works in engine development and has said that the latest small Diesel engines are far more efficient the those that came before, so much development having been done in recent decades on what had before been a relatively undeveloped power plant compared to the effort that went into improving petrol engines. Having said that he also mentioned that there is renewed interest in improving petrol engines as they are far easier to make meet the latest round of emissions regulations, Diesels are becoming increasingly more expensive to make meet the new regulations especially the cost of the exhaust treatments.