What is Digg?99 Comments
- eggo, on 10/12/2007, -6/+68Isn't this just displacing the pollution? The energy to compress the air has to come from somewhere.
- MikeSD34, on 10/12/2007, -0/+39Displacing? Yes, yes it is. Just the same as hydrogen or electric cars.
The reasoning for this? It's easier and more efficient to generate a large mass of energy at a central plant and disseminate it than it is to have everyone carry around a little energy plant with them ( ie the engine or alternator ). - zediker, on 10/12/2007, -13/+46true, but i have a clean solution... *points to the sun*
- LordOfTheSponge, on 10/12/2007, -3/+32Compressed air is not energy free.
- shoover, on 10/12/2007, -4/+21This is really stupid.
1. This isn't new, MDI has said they are 'coming soon' since 1998
2. Gasoline, compressed air and batteries share one significant thing in common, they are a source of stored energy. Currently gasoline proves the best weight vs capacity ratio in a safe package.
3. Until all electricity is generated via a clean source, compressing air and charging batteries both extract a burden on the environment. From other articles I've read on this technology, the energy required to compress air to 4500psi makes this technology rather inefficient. Batteries and electric motors are far more efficient.
4. Batteries are getting better and cheaper, air compressed at 4500psi is extremely dangerous.
I fail to see how this technology is the automotive future. - teckjunkie, on 10/12/2007, -2/+17more detailed information on this car: http://www.theaircar.com/
- pkulak, on 10/12/2007, -4/+15"Isn't this just displacing the pollution? The energy to compress the air has to come from somewhere."
I'm started to get tired of responding to the "Long Tailpipe Myth" myself in ever one of these posts, so, just go to the link below and scroll a bit down the page:
http://www.teslamotors.com/blog1/index.php?p=8&js_enabled=1 - oskite, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12Howstuffworks has a really good section on it.
http://auto.howstuffworks.com/air-car.htm - UrlorJkron, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12The grid is mostly powered by coal. The best thing that could happen is to move from coal to nuclear fission.
- Araden, on 10/12/2007, -5/+13Okay, does anyone know why we use petroleum to power cars today? Because it is a compact power source that we do not need to produce. It's already in the ground waiting to be used. If we attempt to "power" a car with compressed air, we cannot simply drill for compressed air, we have to compress it ourselves. Now go to home depot, or whatever is near you and look at what air compressors work off of. It's gasoline.
Compressed air is not a ready source of energy, it is more like a battery that needs charging, than like gasoline. This is the same problem with electric cars AND hydrogen cars, they need to be charged off of the grid, and where i live the grid is powered by... gasoline. So compressed air, hydrogen, and electric, solve nothing by themselves, what society needs is another SOURCE of power, not another fuel. - Chompy, on 10/12/2007, -9/+16"Why digg down solar power? Anyone? Anyone?"
Because manufacturing solar panels often costs more energy than they recoup, and there's lots of pollution involved in the process as well. - quickgold192, on 10/12/2007, -5/+11Q.How do you fill up the air tank?
A. Air compressor
Q. How do you run the air compressor?
A. Electricity
Q. How do you produce the electricity?
A. Oil burning power plants - sporktek, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Yay! Compressed air is free and it's production causes zero pollution!
Wait. . . - Lokke, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7This car uses an engine in some ways similiar to a combustion engine. This means lots of moving parts.
Moving parts = bad.
Electric wheel induction motors for the win. - FullMetalMonkey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5It's a scam!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moteur_Developpement_International - doodlebumm, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5@eggo
ALMOST ALL alternatives to internal combustion still "displaces" pollution to some extent. Wind power (someone had to manufacture the windmill), solar cells (they don't make themselves), hydrogen (gotta come from someplace), hydro-electric (takes a lot of trips to the cement factory to make a dam), etc. Even if you compress the air with a hand tire pump (not recommended) you will displace the pollution to the fuel used to drive the truck with the extra food you are going to eat to run the pump. Even horses pollute (and it is a stinky mess). the only way to not pollute to some extent is to just not go anywhere.
The question is really - Is the propulsion efficient and the pollution produced acceptable?
It is well known that electric power is one of the most efficient and least polluting means of using energy. The production of electricity is still less polluting than internal combustion engines, even if using coal to produce the electricity. - twinklyJesus, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6The downside is, the car goes 30 feet and then you have to charge up the tank again. OR, in order to increase range, the car has to be the size of a blimp hangar in order to get you the 20 miles to work.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6Chompy, you're wrong about solar. Very wrong... read this blog by the CEO and Chairman of Tesla Motors. It even has purty graphs.
http://www.teslamotors.com/blog1/index.php?p=29&js_enabled=1 - jcounterman, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5....i see your point, but there's plenty of false logic there. we don't drill for gasoline, we drill for crude oil, which must be refined into gas...which is the same theory as compressing air.
I still believe that making hydrocarbons cleaner and more efficient is the only real solution at this point. When other technologies such as wind and solar power really take off....well that's another story. - meepus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Gasoline isn't nearly as explosive as most people (and movies/tv shows) make it out to be.
- pegme, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6What has to be calculated is the "environmental footprint" of a compressed air-powered car. It is true that compressing air uses energy, but if it turns out that the footprint of an individual using compressed air is less than the footprint of an individual using petrol, then the choice would be obvious.
Google for "environmental footprint" to see what I'm talking about, it's not as simple as "compressed air requires energy to make". - Chompy, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6Why are people digging me down for stating facts? Why support a flawed solution or dishonest use of statistics? *Why* are you supporting this stuff if it doesn't actually work?
- Boulevard, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5Compressed air is very expensive to generate. Not to mention the ever-changing pressure difference as you consume 'fuel' from the tank would make for a performance profile with the slope in the wrong direction. ;-)
- UrlorJkron, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Still kinda slow. My diesel rabbit could out run it.
- mutatron, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4If you find a source of power that doesn't pollute, then compressed air is a pollution-free way of storing and transferring that power.
- Boulevard, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Given the power required to compress air, and the amount of real estate available on an average car available for solar panels, a solar recharging unit for an air powered car just isn't practical. You could use alternators for brakes (similar to some electric cars) in order to gain some power for compressing air, but even that combined with solar won't get you very far.
In fact, you'd have to have a VERY large tank (at pressures over 2.4kpsi) to travel very far at all, which may explain why the prototype pictured is a van. - jcounterman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I understand and agree...but I still say that, if we can get clean, cheap electricity out to the masses....then use it to power an electric car, not to waste additional energy pumping up the air that powers the car.
- glmory, on 10/12/2007, -5/+7Yeah, I came to write the same comment. I doubt the efficiency would work out to be better than gas.
- Chompy, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4"I'm started to get tired of responding to the "Long Tailpipe Myth" myself in ever one of these posts, so, just go to the link below and scroll a bit down the page:"
You make a good point here, but this article doesn't talk about *COAL* CO2 emmissions/joule, which is how more than half of the energy in the US is generated. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4One correction to your statement:
Q. How do you run the air compressor?
A. Electricity
Q. How do you produce the electricity?
A. SOLAR POWER / WIND FARMS / HYDRO-ELECTRIC TURBINES / OTHER ALTERNATIVE SOURCES FOR ENERGY - mricon, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5Yes, of course, this isn't "free energy". Many of you were quick to point out that this is just moving energy production (and pollution) from inside the automobile to some place elsewhere, all while being less efficient than gasoline internal combustion engine in the first place. This is a common objection to electric cars, hydrogen cars, or any other similar solution.
What many of you forget to also note is that:
1. Large energy plants are significantly more efficient than individual car engines.
2. It's much easier to stick huge bulky pollution filters onto a stationary building than on a light moving vehicle.
3. An energy plant can be located far away from large cities (coal, nuclear), or close to places where alternative energy sources are abundant, such as in the middle of a desert (solar), next to a shore (tidal energy), or in the mountains (geo-thermal).
We actually don't have to switch away from carbohydrate fuels. There are several promising technologies that are surprisingly efficient at synthesizing petroleum products from stuff like biomass, but you do lose more energy than you get back, so they won't be replacing imported oil any time in the future. However, they can act as an excellent bridge between the gasoline economy of today, and whatever replaces it in the future.
The advantages of "clean fuels" like hydrogen or air, in this case, is that they pose no additional environmental risk to pedestrians, who are in the immediate vicinity of car exhaust. Sure, the pollution still occurs somewhere, but, as I pointed out above, it's a lot simpler to control it on a large non-moving installation. - Berkana, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2This may be cleaner than having millions of cars all spewing their own exhaust from burning gas, but there is one unavoidable loss of energy that is not insignificant:
When you compress a gas, it heats up; all the internal energy gets concentrated, and that heat radiates away. (Conversely hen you decompress a gas, it cools down; that's why canned air gets so cold when you let pressure out.)
To find out how much energy is lost, on a PV (pressure vs. volume) diagram for air, plot out the initial (probably atmospheric) and final pressures, and the volume of the storage canister. At the intersection of the final volume and final pressure plot, plot the adiabat that intersects this point, and plot the isotherm that intersects the point where the adiabat intersects the initial pressure line. Integrate the two functions to find the area between the adiabat and the isotherm starting at the volume of the canister, and ending where the adiabat and isotherm intersect. The result is in units of energy, because P*V = force * distance, which is physically equivalent to energy.
The result is the amount of energy lost when you compress the air and let it cool down to ambient temperatures in its compressed state. Folks, this is not negligible; if you plot this "wedge" inside the PV plot of a stirling cycle (which is energetically equivalent to the Carnot cycle, the theoretically maximally efficient cycle) you'll see that this wedge is nearly half the energy that can be extracted between the two temperatures. They need to take this into account to make sure that they still break even, because as far as I see, every time they operate this thing, they are setting themselves up to lose that much energy through radiating away heat from the compressed air; the loss is simply hidden from the user and moved to the compressor. - ri59, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"'m starting to get tired of responding to the "Long Tailpipe Myth" myself "
And I'm getting tired of you posting that 10 times in this one story. - Tarnum, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2The pollution is still here. How we generate the electricity to compress the air for this car? The car is clean, but the power source is most likely "dirty" - a coal, oil or nuclear power station.
- H3avyC, on 10/12/2007, -4/+6Why couldn't you just use solar power to compress the air?
- Sagan1337, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3The last thing I heard about this car was, that they wanted to launch here in Germany in 2005, but that they couldn't find any investors. The company is most likely never going to release this.
- onelikeseabass, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3the same way a gas engine does it... an alternator connected to the engine.
the alternator is attached to a belt that is turned when the pistons move
i don't work on cars, but that's about as basic as you can get for an explantion. - chedabob, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The term you are looking for is "dugg".
- inmatarian, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The only problem as I see it when it comes to the class of cars that use a stored energy thats not a liquid pumped up from the ground somewhere, is that they depend on the electrical infrastucture. I remember that blackout that put out the entire east coast a couple years back, and every storm that blows through, I hear reports of tens ouf thousands of people in Westchester without power. The grid is great, but it's not 100% dependable, and adding another load on top of it is just placing all of our eggs in one basket.
But don't get me wrong, I really like the idea of alternative sources. I only want a practical one. - Slovenian6474, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@zeeeej
You do realize that gasoline isn't "highly explosive" in the liquid state. The fumes, on the other hand, is what's highly flammable. i would consider a decent sized 4500psi compressed air tank more destructive in the occurance of an accident. - AMDnVidiaATi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1It sounds like a great idea and all, but with a top speed of 55MPH the car is not going to be good for a practical driver.
Too bad as it sounded like a wonderful idea from the title. I don't see this going anywhere. - ChaperonNoir, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I won't comment on this article because to me, it looks like a scam :
- The website is only available in English, Portugese and Spanish. But they're supposed to be French right? Moteur Developpement International.... What a joke.
I speak French, and these guys obviously don't speak it.
Hell, look at this page. There's all the text in English , and the image in Spanish.
http://www.theaircar.com/howitworks.html
The website , and the information there, it smells bad to me. And their names too. Guy Nègre... what an uncommon name for a French. - stinkypyper, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I think the best thing is a Hybrid engine that stores it energy in a cheap light compressed air tank instead of a heavy expensive batteries. Think about it, cars already have cylinders for compressing and utilizing the air. This is a way cheaper and less complex alternative to electric hybrids.
- Manhigh, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3The "* is not an energy source" argument is getting on my nerves.
Nothings an energy source. Everything is an energy storage medium. - freakofnature, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Maybe a neat addition to this would be a auto-solar-rechargeable air compression unit. Which automatically recharges your air-tank by either solar or wind energy. The device shouldn't take much space. And with that, you'll never have to re-pump the air yourself.
We'll just have to see... - Methodius, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Also, wherever there's a good source (river valleys and the like):
Q. How do you produce the electricity?
A. Hydroelectric power plants - zeeeej, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Maybe you're right. Frankly I don't care how we get there, as long as we manage to cut back on greenhouse gases. Could be we all end up with Flinstone YabaDabaDooMobiles. The key is to try every decent idea and see which ones stick.
The compressor car may flop (actually, it probably will), but good on 'em for trying. - jcounterman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Seems I didn't explain myself too well. I wasn't saying that petroleum products don't have a power source...only that they aren't simply yanked from the ground and thrown into your gas tank. They must go through a process to transform their properties into something we can use...just like the comopressing of air.
- js530, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"somebody commented on the air pressure in the tanks being dangerous ; it isn't. The air is stored in carbon Fiber tanks that merely rupture when broken rather than exploding. Leaking air is preferable to an exploding gas tank or battery in my book."
But what happens when the car hits something, and the regulator breaks off the cylinder valve? And even if the air is "leaking" from the tank, at 4500 PSI its probably enough to rupture your ear drums. Not to mention the high pressure infrastructure, which makes things very expensive and dangerous. Think $30-40K for a compressor that might fill the car in an hour. - M0b1u5, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Sorry - WRONG.
A local company here in Christchurch has been developing the same technology - licenced from a French company for THE LAST 12 YEARS.
So "First car powered by air" could not be more wrong if it tried.
LAME. Buried. -
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