Berkeley Engineers Have Some Bad News About Air Cars

cheeks5965 writes "We've argued before over compressed air vehicles, a.k.a. air cars. Air cars are an enchanting idea, providing mobility with zero fuel consumption or environmental impacts. The NYTimes' Green Inc. blog reports that the reality is less rosy. New research from UC Berkeley and ICF International puts a period at the end of the discussion, showing that compressed air is a very poor fuel, storing less than 1% of the energy in gasoline; air cars won't get you far, with a range of just 29 miles in typical city driving; and despite appearing green the vehicles are worse for the environment, with twice the carbon footprint as gasoline vehicles, from producing the electricity used to compress the air. Given these barriers, manufacturer claims should definitely be taken with a grain of salt."

Comments

Re:"zero fuel"?

[Toonol]

Store air in a vertical tank. If the air has an average pressure P, it will naturally (due to gravity) form a pressure gradient. The air at the bottom will be slightly higher then P, the air at the top will be slightly less.

Now attach it to another tank, with an inlet leading from the bottom of the first tank to the top of the second. The new tank will pressure equalize, but the top will be equal to the bottom P from the first tank; the bottom P will be even higher. Disconnect, and then repeat with more tanks, each time using the peak pressure of the first tank to feed into the point of minimum pressure in the second tank. With enough increments, an arbitrarily high pressure can be achieved. Of course, this isn't really practical; it requires too many small steps to obtain useful pressures.

Re:Zero Emissions are worse??

[Rockoon]

Hey lazy dipshit

let me google that for you