Cars That Run on Compressed Air

No my friend, wont have to pay for that sweet fresh air. Some one will be smart enough to charge us for the Labor!!

 

Someone (like the power company) will charge us for the engergy needed to compress the air.

 

i got my own air compressor, its for the air-tools, like mechanics use. would that be sufficent to power thecar?

 

And what do you think powers the air compressor? Why would you want to use such an inefficient device to powe your car?

It's a good job I forgot to replace the batteries in my bullshit-o-meter else this thread might just have blown it up. Really, it'd be off the scale. Man.

 

^^ Compressed air has more engergy than atmospheric air. That extra is the energy that is used when the power tools are used.

However, the electic energy used to compress the air is far more than what you get out of the tool in the end.

There is a similar loss of energy if compressed air is used to power a vehicle. There are much more efficiant ways to power a vehicle.

 

Oh god, I just typed out a long post about the inefficiencies of all the energy transfers that must occur for you to finally compress this air in your garage and stick it in your car, but then I realised it really doesn't matter what I say. When it comes down to it you will just look at the top layer of the concept and have no concern whatsoever for any consequences, and not even a smidgen of thought for anything that happens before the end result. Y'know, sod the facts and all that. It's like that girl who said she drank water because it was free and had no chemicals.

I can see how you might think your air compressor would be a good friendly way to power your vehicle: "Hey maaan, my car is running on air! That's like.. no emissions! Love vegetables dude."

 

The theory isn't that you compress it in your garage it's that the vehicle compresses it through mechanical compression. I'd rather expend air than ethanol or petroleum. And gears and cogs can compress air. As much as ethanol and petroleum can cause combustion in todays cars.

 

Electricity in most cases power the air compressors you have in your garages, with proper battery storage, modern cars could generate their own compressed air much as their alternators keep the batteries in cars recharged.

 

That's just your basic perpetual motion concept. It won't work. It takes a lot more energy to compress air than you get back out of it. Attempting to use the vehicle's motion to compress air would do nothing but rob the vehicle of efficiency - it'd have even less endurance on a charge.

 

How is it that a few cents for electricity in your garage or carport can fill your tires, but to think that air compression could power an engine is unbelievable when internal combustion does nothing more than provide compression to the cylinders through the use of petroleum products to supply compression through firing and emission.

 

I never once said a car couldn't be powered by compressed air, just that it's not going to compress its own air to keep moving.

The compression stroke of an ICE isn't powered solely by compressed air. It's the energy from the combustion that keeps the cycle going (and the excess from it that propels the car).

In using compressed air to compress air, there's no breaking even to keep the cycle going, let alone an excess to propel the vehicle. You always need an external source.

 

Unless a few multi-billionaires work their asses off, cars like that aren't going to surface and come into mass production in the US in the near future. What most people don't realize is that car companies and oil companies are not oblivious to eachother. It's like a "you scratch my back, I scratch yours" kind of deal. A motor company whose stocks are 50% owned by Shell or any other gas company are not going to put into production cars that do not run on fossil fuels.

There have been many cars that run on other things than gas. There is one where the electrons from the hydrogen's (on some thingygumwat i can't remember) electrons transfer away to power the car electrically, while the protons go through some negatively charged wall thing and mix with oxygen...creating water. This means that the waste is water...which is probably the LEAST harmful substance humans would want.

 

I worked about this in school today. To get the electricity efficiently though you will need to burn fossil fuels. If we could get the electricity from nucleur power, then yea no waste from cars running on hydrogen. It's just the electricity part that holds us back.

 

Electricity can be produced through hydrolic/water driven means (rivers/streams). Many of the hydrolyic pits were closed here in California after deregulation. Who's interest was protected through this.