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Compressed Air Propulsion (Trams; Cars; Other Vehicles)

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Anonymous

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The French have come up with a car that runs on compressed air. From the BBC:

'Engineers in France believe they have come up with the answer that environmentalists and economists have spent years searching for: a commercially viable, 100% non-polluting car, which costs next to nothing to run.

The latest prototype will be unveiled on Thursday at the Paris motor show...

...But we were told it has a steering wheel in the middle, with passenger seats either side, a boot the size of the biggest estate, but in overall size terms is no bigger than a Smart car.


The air is compressed at pressure about 150 times the rate you would put into car tyres or your bicycle.'
 
If the air tak got a punture the thing would zoom around like a balloon.... :eek!!!!:
 
There was one on Tomorrows World a couple of years ago - could have been french can't really remember. It was big green thing and they were testing it as a taxi, but it was kinda noisy.


a commercially viable, 100% non-polluting car, which costs next to nothing to run.

Apart from the powerstation needed to power the pump to fill the tanks:D
 
Sounds interesting, but will it go the way of ginger, never to be heard of again?
 
p.younger said:
Sounds interesting, but will it go the way of ginger, never to be heard of again?
Yess, Biggles?

And what ever happened to the Anglo-French, Flying Passenger Sheep?
 
AndroMan said:
And what ever happened to the Anglo-French, Flying Passenger Sheep?

A sheep that passed in the night :)

I'll get me coat....
 
Goodnight to electric cars; farewell the mainstay of mad science for so long: the car running on water; Ladies and gentlemen we now have:
Inventor says his car runs on air
From Robyn Curnow, CNN
Saturday, January 24, 2004 Posted: 0015 GMT ( 8:15 AM HKT)

(CNN) - It sounds like an ordinary car. But it's not. In the South of France, inventor Guy Negre says he's developed a car that runs on air.

He says that no fuel is necessary to power the car that can travel at speeds close to 70-miles-per-hour. It's a whole lot of fresh air, driving an engine that Negre says is zero-polluting.

It's a radical concept that Negre says he's been developing since 1997, and he says he has more than 30 patents to protect his invention.

"The invention is in the engine. The invention is in the industrial process. ... This technology is based on a rotation system exploited by cars which use natural gas. It is used even by people who work with combustion fuel. Hydrogen under pressure systems and even the tanks of a fireman's air reserve are based on this technology," Negre says.
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/01/23/air.car/index.html

The article has a link to this site: http://www.aircaraccess.com
 
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errr yes....peers over glases.... ive seen a harvard van powerd by compressed air on the telly.... to get any range the back of it was full of air tanks and they kept iceing up (expansion of gas takes heat from the air and it freezes, like when u spray an airosol)... there simply arnt enough callories in compressed air to work efectively for any apreciable time....
 
Yes, it's possible to run a motor on compressed air, but you need energy to compress the air, and this is where the site turns into drivel.

There has to be energy going into the system somewhere to compress the air, and since driving the system can't be 100% effective as some energy will be lost in friction etc. you won't get more energy out or even as much energy out as you put in.

This piece of science is complete bollocks:
The air in the pre-filled tank represents enough energy to start and run every device on the car, and then some. The trick is to manipulate this energy through knowledgeable design so that it is not dissipated any more than necessary, in order to keep the tank full. The real trick is “Maxwell’s Demon,” which we have discovered is the Bernoulli Effect: air pressure can be converted into air velocity (jet drive), so that in the localized absence of pressure (low pressure zone inside tank) the high velocity jet can induce low pressure air (continuous source of solar energy) into the tank without wasting a lot of energy compressing it to get it in. Because of air’s internal energy (heat that is there before and after the air is compressed), the power needed to generate compressed air is uniquely unrelated to the power available from the compressed air thus created. This gives the appearance of perpetual motion, but is not; it is a heat-pumping process. Like many existing commercial heat pumps, this system can provide more energy than it consumes; that is, its C.O.P. (coefficient of performance) is greater than one.

Maxwell's Demon is a thought experiment, you might as well try to run the car with treadmill powered by Schroedinger's Cat.
 
Another inventor makes unlikely claims:

Australian inventor makes engine that runs off air
Thu Aug 26,11:04 AM ET

MELBOURNE, Australia (AFP) - An Australian inventor claims to have made the world's first commercially-viable motor vehicle powered by compressed air.

The vehicle is being tried out by contractors in Melbourne's parks and gardens over the next 12 months as an alternative to conventional diesel or petrol engines.

The engine's designer, Angelo Di Pietro from Melbourne company Engineair, said the engine produced no pollutants and had only two moving parts, increasing its efficiency over conventional designs.

Di Pietro said it used compressed air to drive a rotary engine, abandoning the pistons and cylinders seen in regular designs.

The vehicle being tested in Melbourne has reached 50 kilometres an hour (31 miles an hour) in the workshop and had proved more efficient than battery-powered golf carts.

Di Pietro said the engine's potential was immense and he claimed to have attracted interest from the United States, China, the Netherlands and Britain.
Source
Their site: http://www.engineair.com.au

They do appear to be building real world applciations:
engineair.com.au/development.htm
Link is dead. The MIA webpage can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20040829015112/http://www.engineair.com.au/development.htm


So perhaps this isn't as unlikely as it seems. Interesting........
 
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The engine's designer, Angelo Di Pietro from Melbourne company Engineair, said the engine produced no pollutants and had only two moving parts, increasing its efficiency over conventional designs.

-------------
My bike's engine has two moving parts; they are called my legs.

Pretty efficient, too.
 
Everything old is new again ...

Egyptian students design car that runs on air
A group of Egyptian students has designed a vehicle they say will battle rising energy prices and promote clean energy by running on nothing but air.

The undergraduate students, who built the vehicle as part of their graduation project from Helwan University just outside Cairo, are rolling out a prototype one-person vehicle that runs on compressed oxygen.

The go-kart-like vehicle comes as Egypt pushes ahead with painful economic reforms that include deep cuts to energy subsidies, measures tied to a three-year $12 billion IMF loan program it began in late 2016.

The students say their vehicle can hit 40 kilometers an hour and last 30 kilometers before needing to be refueled, and it only costs about 18,000 Egyptian pounds ($1,008.40) to build.

"The operational cost of the vehicle... will be almost nothing. You are basically using compressed air. You are not paying for fuel and also you do not need cooling," said Mahmoud Yasser, a student who helped design it.

The team is now looking to raise funding to expand the project and mass produce the vehicles. They believe they can eventually get the vehicles to top 100 kilometers an hour and run for 100 kilometers before needing to come up for air.

SOURCE (with photo):
https://www.yahoo.com/news/egyptian-students-design-car-runs-air-185806992.html

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...nts-design-car-that-runs-on-air-idUSKBN1KT2E0
 
The real Fortean thing here is how they are compressing all that air (or in some cases, apparently, "oxygen") without using any fuel — especially if they are doing it to 150 times the "rate" (sic) you would put it into your car tyres or bicycle.

My car tyres run at around 2.6 bar, my bike tyres at around 6 bar or a little more, so that's somewhere between 390 bar and 900 bar.

I know a little bit about compressors and in order to produce not only the pressure, but the volume of compressed air required, you would need a diesel (or similar engine) that would be more than adequate to power the car.

As with electric vehicles, clean at the point of use, but with pollution caused elsewhere.
 
The real Fortean thing here is how they are compressing all that air (or in some cases, apparently, "oxygen") without using any fuel — especially if they are doing it to 150 times the "rate" (sic) you would put it into your car tyres or bicycle. ...
I know a little bit about compressors and in order to produce not only the pressure, but the volume of compressed air required, you would need a diesel (or similar engine) that would be more than adequate to power the car.
As with electric vehicles, clean at the point of use, but with pollution caused elsewhere.

Exactly ... This point is illustrated by the following passage concerning the Mekarski compressed air system used in trams:

The system was used in England on the Wantage Tramway but did not find favour there because the compressor plant used more than four times as much coal as a steam locomotive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mekarski_system

It seems there was one application of pneumatic propulsion that justified itself over time - trams / locomotives used in mines, where flame or sparks represented an explosion risk.
 
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