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Compressed-Air Car Nears Trial
DeviceGuru writes "Air France and KLM have announced plans to conduct a six-month trial of a new zero-emission, compressed-air powered vehicle. The AirPod seats three, can do 28 mph, and goes about 135 miles on a tank of compressed air. Motor Development International, the vehicle's developer, expects the AirPod to reach production by mid-2009, and to sell for around 6,000 Euro. Initially, it will be manufactured in India by Tata Motors, and distributed in France and India."
...would hate to see someone siphon fuel from this car!
always mosh clockwise
Parts of this thing will get fucking cold. Just imagine all the heat lost when the compressed air is let to cool down.
Oh well, not like I care about the environment or anything.
28 MPH is not fast enough for realistic street travel.
The concept is not entirely worthless though. If you apply the power train to a bicycle frame you have a very powerful upgrade to a standard bicycle, and with the even higher power to weight ratio you have a considerable speed upgrade as well.
I predict this will flop pretty badly because of this speed limitation, and if it starts to take off people will have them banned as "moving road blocks".
I, for one, would not tolerate an urban landscape clogged by a bunch of people who can't go faster than my grandmother. I hope they also come standard with the requisite continuously running directional indicator for those speeds.
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How much energy is required to run the compressor to fill the high pressure air cylinders?
Obviously more than you get out of the drive line at the other end of the system. Compressed air does lose lot of energy to heat.
In fact calculating energy loss would almost be a textbook example in thermodynamics.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
you've never been behind someone going 15 miles under with the blinker on?
where do you live, rural north dakota?
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I don't know about the US, but most European cities have speed limits of 50 km/h (around 31 mph), so it's not that far of.
Actually, I would not mind this type of car getting popular, since it would lower the air and noise pollution in crammed cities quite considerably.
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
I don't know about the US, but most European cities have speed limits of 50 km/h (around 31 mph), so it's not that far of.
Actually, I would not mind this type of car getting popular, since it would lower the air and noise pollution in crammed cities quite considerably.
Zero-emissions, true, but I'd watch the videos before claiming this would lower noise pollution. It seemed sort of loud, at least in the video I watched.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
It's a heat engine, no more efficient than a petrol powered engine, but with the problem of low density energy storage. Basically it doesn't look good compared to batteries and electric drive.
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Seriously though, about the 28mph : this is marketed as a city car. Most of the time, in cities, you'd be happy to be driving at that speed. In most bigger cities, the circulation is stop and go for the better part of the day, along with some awfull air polution. Only airpowered car would be a blessing .. I guess there is a reason why India is so interested in this technology.
"DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
Yes, but you can run the compressor with a coal powered boiler, a windmill, a team of oxen, a dam, or a volcanic heat outlet. It's not the power or the efficiency that matters, it's the style with which you transform that energy. Steam-punk FTW!
The article says there are 4 other models planned, with one reaching speeds of 70mph... It also seems to hint that the initial models are being used as maintenance vehicles and such. Their first major test buyer is Air France. Its more like their initial models are looking to replace electric cars in the workplace, not for high way driving. But of course you knew all of this, because no one comments without first reading the article.
28MPH when the car is fully charged, I assume? How about when the tank is 1/2 full? Does it have a heater for the winter?
A novel idea, but if we're going to make people movers, electric sounds like a more realistic implementation. An electric go-kart isn't that hard to mass produce.
Also, I'm wondering if these guys have mane any progress, lately.
Which can be dealt with more effectively than it can on each car.
Here is a vehicle that is not as fast as 28MPH and its so popular that I can continuously hear their sound as I type this: Auto Rikshaw
Yup, in the UK the speed limit is 30mph in built-up areas. There are a few bits where the speed limit is 50mph in bits of town that have major roads running through them, but if it can actually go at 28mph, then it's fast enough for in-town driving. You wouldn't want to drive it between cities though.
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"IT'S OVER THERE! LOOK AT WHERE I'M SHINING!"
If you hear that in the bush and the lights on you, best hit the deck quick smart.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Allright then.. what's the heat source?
The environment.
The compressed gas enters the expansion cylinder at environmental temperature and as it expands, it cools, in exactly the same way as the combustion gases in an Internal Combustion Engine cool as they expand.
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Uh, no. It's not a heat engine, because heat is not causing expansion. In fact, as you point out, as it expands, it cools. This actually robs power from the engine! If the engine were to be heated somehow, it would probably be substantially more efficient. It is no more accurate to describe MDI's air engine as a "heat engine" than to describe a single pneumatic cylinder being driven by a compressor and used to do work as a "heat engine" - or by extension, a hydraulic cylinder. (Saying that liquids "don't compress" is a simplification of real-world physics, after all.) The heat is A) a byproduct of the gas compression problem, B) is not used to do work, and C) does not increase overall anyway. You don't actually increase heat energy when you compress a gas, aside from the wasted energy converted to heat by the compressor. You increase temperature, but only because you've put more mass into the same space. The heat per unit of mass does not change and that is why this is not a heat engine.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"Four other models, featuring speeds up to about 70 mph, are also on the drawing board."
A company called MDI already has compressed air cars on the streets of Mexico city. Here is a youtube video with some interviews with them. They actually make several cars and can get over 60mph and 200mph per fillup. Fillup takes 3 minutes with pre-compressed air or 4 hours off a home compressor.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztFDqcu8oJ4
Note, disregard the commentators crackpot statement about perpetual motion at the end. The company isn't making that claim.
You also have pollution where the electricity is produced but that is true of all the alternatives being suggested today. It is far more efficient and economical to produce clean energy on a large scale at a power plant than it is at the vehicle level.
For that matter, with current scrubber technology even coal power is actually pretty clean. It's not renewable and isn't a solution but in the meantime its cleaner than burning gas on a car by car basis. It's certainly cleaner than creation and disposal rechargeable batteries.
28 MPH is not fast enough for realistic street travel. [...] I, for one, would not tolerate an urban landscape clogged by a bunch of people who can't go faster than my grandmother.
Check out French "car" maker Ligier. They, and others, have been producing similar vehicles for several years. Just diesel-powered, and less silly-looking. They are classified as mopeds, and are therefore not allowed to go faster than 45km/h (28mph). (Some models are classified as 4-wheel motorcycles and can go faster).
Not being classified as a "car" means they don't have to pass crash tests, so it's probably a good thing they don't go faster.
Perhaps for ground service vehicles in airports.
Apparently you've never enjoyed realistic street travel in a crowded major city such as midtown New York or central London, where 28 mph would be pretty optimistic and, on some streets, illegal.
The AirPod looks oddly like the auto-rickshaws used in Delhi, or the tuk-tuk of Bangkok. These devices generally are powered by internal-combustion engines that burn CNG (compressed natural gas).
They're plenty fast enough for high-density urban surface street travel, and in India I've seen as many as 10 people crammed into one, traveling on rural highways.
I'm puzzled by the KLM-Air France connection, although I suppose these would make fine runabouts for airport workers. Sort of like golf carts.
On another note ...
Most of the comments I'm reading here completely miss the point of the compressed air, which is not a carbon-neutral fuel source but essentially just the equivalent of a wind-up spring. That lets the vehicle be powered by any energy source, depending on how the air is compressed. You get to carbon-neutral by using some non-petroleum power to compress the air, such as nuclear-generated electrical energy.
Electric cars work the same way, but I have to wonder about the environmental impact of disposal of the batteries, which do wear out.
In the United States, many states and municipalities have already approved low-speed electrics for local commuting. They are generally limited to 25mph (which I consider to be an asinine limitation), and have short range like 30 miles or so. Of course you can't take them on highways or other high-speed streets.
I, too, argue that this is not very practical... but it is apparently pracical enough for many people to have bought them.
It's taking a long time to change the actual layout of cities, but in the last decade or so there has been a lot of evidence that (in certain situations) decreasing the speed limit on city streets improves capacity. That's right, not just reducing traffic jams by making it less desirable to drive, but actually increasing capacity. Freeways have long been known to have their highest capacity when just about everybody is going just about 55 miles/hour. There are lots of complicated reasons for this, but one of the obvious ones is that when cars go faster, the size of the empty bubble around them increases, particularly when not all cars are going the same speed.
I live in the UTC area of San Diego, and our main roads are three lanes each way and have speed limits of 45 miles/hour. That's great for the 20 seconds you spend accelerating to the next red light, which is probably about 2 minutes long.
In short, systems are more complicated than individuals. If you're the only person on the road, sure, you're going to go faster if you're going at 45mph than 28mph. But when there are intersections, stoplights, *other cars*, and traffic jams, are you going to go faster if everybody is trying to reach 45mph? Not necessarily, and in some cases emphatically NO.
and personally I'd ease up and shove one of these little annoyances out of my way.
I was taking you seriously on your other comment, but now I'm wondering if you are just an Internet Tough Guy(TM)
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Trams and carts running in hazardous environments used compressed air one hundred years ago. The History of Compressed Air Vehicles
Compressed air is used to start the engines of a commercial jet - which means that KLM and Air France probably have the necessary infrastructure in place on the ground. Compressed-air engine
The problem with the wind-up car is that you need a pretty big spring and pretty big key - and someone strong enough to wind it up.
Henry Ford chose gasoline for two fundamental reasons:
A gallon of gas could transport a family of four and their baggage about twenty-five miles - a full day's excursion by horse and buggy.
In 1896 you could economically ship and store a barrel of gasoline almost anywhere by rail.
For greater safety and profits, a dealer might do better burying a tank, buying in bulk and distributing from a hand pump.
You could make a decent living this way and never see rural electric service until the New Deal of the Thirties.
Watching the video, I thought, "great, a jackhammer that drives around."
Still, it's a cool idea, especially if you build something like an exercise-bike powered air compressor. If filling the whole tank this way is too much work, you could use it to put a few psi in the tank.
My grandmother used anecdotal evidence all the time, and she lived to be 120 years old.
I dunno about you, but in the first video I heard a very definite "jackhammer" sound. Not only that, the engineer was obviously defensive when asked about noise. "no, really, it's not loud, it only seems that way; it's different! People just need to learn to get used to it."
Yeah, it's got a noise problem.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Not for road distances or for beer measures (although all other pub measures are in cl now).
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You have concisely outlined here why oil is such a fantastic energy source. The stored potential energy in a tank of fuel is enormous, the ease by which it is transported is unprecedented in all our technology.
Fancy alternatives all fail at these incredibly important factors which add up to why we use oil. Personally I believe the best solution to our dirty energy problems is to make carbon neutral oil and use that. Its energy intensive to do but oil is so damn useful, and to hell with the current fads.
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In the 1890s, high-pressure steam, electricity and compressed air weren't available outside the biggest cities, at any price.
In 2008, it is still hard to see how you make the "alternative fuel" available, attractive and affordable outside the urban core.
The New York Times posted a story on the revival of the Erie Barge Canal:
The canal still remains the most fuel-efficient way to ship goods between the East Coast and the upper Midwest. One gallon of diesel pulls one ton of cargo 59 miles by truck, 202 miles by train and 514 miles by canal barge. A single barge can carry 3,000 tons, enough to replace 100 trucks. Hints of Comeback for Nation's First Superhighway