AIR CAR. Motors run on compressed air.
 

This is the future technology that everyone should be investing in.

LA to NY on one tank of gas!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmqpGZv0YT4

nobody has any input on this?

Looks very promising, especially for city and industrial driving. Not sure how well it would work for semi's in the mountains as they do need a LOT of torque...but it makes me wonder how hard it would be to adapt a car. The Indian/French model looks like it could easily be powered by scuba equipment and a home compressor at 4500psi can be had pretty cheaply!

RickyD -

I am blocked from seeing it here at work. Are there any non-video articles on this?

CarloSW2

Blocked too.
Can someone outline the concept briefly?

https://www.popularmechanics.com/auto...s/4217016.html

India’s largest automaker is set to start producing the world’s first commercial air-powered vehicle. The Air Car, developed by ex-Formula One engineer Guy Nègre for Luxembourg-based MDI, uses compressed air, as opposed to the gas-and-oxygen explosions of internal-combustion models, to push its engine’s pistons. Some 6000 zero-emissions Air Cars are scheduled to hit Indian streets in August of 2008.

Barring any last-minute design changes on the way to production, the Air Car should be surprisingly practical. The $12,700 CityCAT, one of a handful of planned Air Car models, can hit 68 mph and has a range of 125 miles. It will take only a few minutes for the CityCAT to refuel at gas stations equipped with custom air compressor units; MDI says it should cost around $2 to fill the car’s carbon-fiber tanks with 340 liters of air at 4350 psi. Drivers also will be able to plug into the electrical grid and use the car’s built-in compressor to refill the tanks in about 4 hours.

Of course, the Air Car will likely never hit American shores, especially considering its all-glue construction. But that doesn’t mean the major automakers can write it off as a bizarre Indian experiment — MDI has signed deals to bring its design to 12 more countries, including Germany, Israel and South Africa.

RickyD -

Thanks for the url ...
Ok, my opinion is that when you translate that car to the US, it gets heavier for safety reasons and therefore loses max speed and range. Let's say for the purpose of argument, it loses 25% of both :

68 MPH becomes 51 MPH
125 Miles becomes 93 Miles

IF I am right, then it would be a great local driver, but not a freeway commuter because of the max speed.

However, the picture of the car is optimized for "urban cargo", like a Japanese sub-minivan, not for commuting. If you put the drivetrain in a 2 seat aero-optimized commuter, then maybe you would have a winner.

Does this car (and/or my opinion) run on hot air or cold air ;) ?

CarloSW2

air car 3
 

This is the 3rd separate thread in recent days of the air car.

Link to one of the others:

https://www.gassavers.org/showthread.php?
p=54959&highlight=air+car#post54959

brucepick: please read the PM I sent you earlier today.

even so if you ran a small diesel generator in the back to recharge the air your miles could become huge. In the video I first posted they claim LA to NY on one tank of gas

RickyD -

Cool. I will have to watch it when I get home. Sounds like an excuse to beef up the air compressors at Gas Stations. That would be an easy infrastructure upgrade.

EDIT : And a diesel generator operating at ONE RPM for best efficiency!

CarloSW2

But, you still can't get something for nothing. Running a generator and a compressor and an air motor is waaayyyyy less efficient than just running a diesel engine...

ummmmm errrrrrrrr ummmmmmmm

how so. The producers of this engine claim LA to NY on ONE tank of gas, supposidly to run the generator..

I dont know how anything can be more efficent then that.

Does it even use gas? I thought the on-board compressor only plugged in for a 4 hour fill-up? One tank of gas is deceiving. If you were carrying another engine you couldn't achieve similar statistics same with adding a gas tank. Large compressors to compress air make sense because larger engines are more efficient such as lose of huge ships. Perhaps if air were compressed many times more than necessary and transported to stations where it was metered into car tanks. But moving around highly compressed anything is dangerous. They are just moving the emissions from the automobile to a centralized location which could (in theory) be dealt with more easily. Enough compressed air could move anything, but its all in the safety, weight, efficiency.

"one tank of gas" I met a guy once who hauled 50 gallons of bio-diesel with him on a road 2,000 mile road trip, he made the whole trip on "one tank" one of the big reasons that air cars are not widly used is that they are basicly a steam engine running off a tank of air, it's not really anything fancy or new, altho they are lighter weight and more efficent, but just like the frost on the out side of a propane tank, the air tanks get extreamly cold, and the engine gets extreamly cold, when this happens the compressed air shrinks so your range drops, try that in wisconsin in the winter and your air car is going to be a solid block of ice with an empty tank, in india and south africa when they make these it's not so much of an issue.
but still, you have to remember, air is just an energy storage system, just like hydrogen, it's takes alot of energy to get it in to it's useable form, I was remineded today of the hydrogen problem, how it takes something like 60% of the energy in hydrogen to compress it to a presure where you could get enough of it in a vehicle.

RickyD -

Ok, here's another youtube video on the same subject :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFbKINlXzRk

It *claims* to be pretty cheap, even at an air pump station they are designing, something like $3+ dollars for 100 miles.

It definitely is an urban sub-freeway car, and it has to be light, so I think in it's current form it would be limited to 25 MPH, aka the Zenn around town electric golf-carts.

I do like that it is using caron fiber to lower weight.

Question : How much emissions from the air pump for each 100 mile tank?

Question : How does it compare to batteries, aka another energy storage system?

CarloSW2

I was having a similar discussion with a friend about this vehicle...based on this site:

https://www.popularmechanics.com/auto...s/4217016.html

1) range of 125 miles
2) carbon-fiber tanks with 340 liters of air at 4350 psi
3) gives us an air consumption rate of 2.72 L / mile

Assuming the performance numbers are accurate, we started to do some math:

1) 1 ft? = 28.3168 L meaning that the car would have a capacity of appx 12 cf of air.

2) A run-of-the-mill scuba compressor (ie. https://www.americanairworks.com/aircompressor.html -- American Airworks Fast 35 -- Portable AC95535 - Honda 5.5 HP Gas
$3090 ) rated at 3.5 CFM @ 4500psi would recharge the cars air tanks in about 3 1/2 minutes using gasoline.

3) If we assume 1 hour / gallon running at 100% output (in generator form, the Dewalt Heavy-Duty 2900 Watt Gas Generator - DG2900 will run 11.3 hours at 50% output on 3 gallons) and a fuel tank of 3 gallons, the generator should be able to recharge 630 CF of air @ 4500psi in 3 hours.

4) The 630 CF of air should translate to appx 17830 L of high pressure air.

5) This should give a theoretical range of about 6555 miles on 3 gallons of gasoline, or about 2185 miles per gallon. Seems a bit high to me...so lets increase the generators fuel consumption by a factor of 10x. :D You will need 30 gallons for the same trip giving you 218.5 MPG. Seems pretty good.

My only question for such a long trip is: at what speed is that range of 125 miles achieved? If it is at 30 MPH, that's a LOOONG trip!!;)

Perhaps we were up a bit late, and I admit that simple math often trips me up...are we missing something here? Sounds like it is vastly more efficient to have a small compressor running at 100% for short periods and then stretch the resulting stored energy out over a longer period of time using an engine that is designed for that purpose. ??

I don't have the time (or really the desire right now) to do the calculations, but if we assume 100% efficiency, meaning all the calories from burning 3 gallons of gas are used to propel the car, it seems to me that 2185mpg is defying the laws of physics.

I think we are missing something here. I also have to use the few functioing brain cells I have left to remain employed, so back to work.

Well...all the calories from burning 3 gallons is NOT being used to propel the car...it is ONLY being used to compress 630 CF of air. I would assume that it is VERY inefficient as far as % of calories are going to actual air compression.

It seems they are saying that their use of the compressed air is highly efficient in moving the vehicle. Not sure either...and I am also trying to keep earning money. :);) (back to modding bank software)

Whether it's running an aircompressor or not, ultimately, it is propelling the car, and I don't think there's enough calories in 3 gallons of gas to move a car 6555 miles. Compressed air may be an efficient way of moving a car, I just find it a little hard to believe it's that efficient.

If you are modding bank software, anyway to pad my account?

I suppose we could leftpad with a decimal point and a bunch of zeroes. ;)

Now...where did I leave my Ferrari keys? Gotta get back to the villa before the cleaning staff knows I am gone. ;)

How many calories does it take to move this car? Looks like we have about 99,000,000 calories total available in those 3 gallons...now...if we take the more pessimistic value and use 30 gallons...then we have 999,000,000 calories. Now, if it is supposed to take 100,000 calories to jog a mile...we can jog about 10,000 miles for the same energy (at 100% efficiency).

Still seems WAAYYY too efficient, eh? :):) Wonder what is not really being told in the press releases??

When they say a tank of gas they literally mean a (X gallon?) tank of gas iirc. It's used directly by the engine in the same way most engines use gas. The 125 mile range is assuming something like a 20mph average speed, so nothing but dense city (citicat!). Efficiency in the city is less than that of the average electric, but better than the average gasser. Unlike an electric, it doesn't need periodic batt replacement, so it's probably cheaper to operate over it's lifetime so long as electricity stays on the cheap side and operation is mostly urban.

At some point, some idiot will try to kill himself with a garden hose attached his compressed air car.

okay, 30 gallons of fuel, 2400 miles, 80 mpg, I guess it could work in the right conditions. I take it back.

Well...got some more answers (yes...getting slow at work now).

From: https://www.theaircar.com/thecar.html
I don't see any quotes on "high speed" fuel economy, but I will guess that it will be more in line with a conventional vehicle once it runs out of compressed air.