Whoosh

[filkertom]

This has hit, like, a half-dozen blogs, and if it turns out to be as big as I think it might it'll hit a lot more soon. It's not available in the US -- not yet. But... oh, if it was.

Ladies and gentlemen... the Air Car.

Comments

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

oh geez, that thing again?!

You still have to power the compresser. You still have losses in converting it to motion with a piston. Because the pressure drops with use, your car gets weaker and weaker as it goes about its drive. You still have to have a large tank of very high pressure air in the car with you that will turn to shrapnel in any impact. And you still make the tank super hot when you pump it full of high pressure air which makes the vehicle uncomfortable and weakens composite materials which make low-weight tanks (problems with temperatures and pressures doomed the tank design of the X33). What you are left with is a vehicle that has to be refueled for 15 minutes every day (average commute) and can explode under impact without any ignition source at all. The only advantage this has is that you use no power sitting at a traffic light - unless the radio or headlights are on, that is.

All the weakness of an electric car, but none of the positives. And if you think there is no pollution, ask yourself what is being burned at the power plant that powers the compresser at the Air station.

[admnaismith.livejournal.com]

Who says "no pollution" or "no downside"? I'm seeing "much less pollution" and "cheaper" and "needs work to become truly awesome", which seems plenty good to me.

I love it when settling for anything less than utterly perfect Utopia is presented as unacceptable, for liberals. Can you imagine if the conservatives said, "No! Owning 85% of America's wealth is just stupid! If we can't have 100%--us, Everything, everyone else, NOTHING--then it's just not worth trying and we should give up"?

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Thank You.

[solarbird]

Hi, I'm not the person to whom you responded. (I'm also, fwiw, not a liberal. Nor a conservative.)

I, in turn, am rather discouraged when, in the face of literally decades of pronouncements like this - the "compressed-air free-fuel car!" has a scam history over 100 years old - these announcements are taken on faith at face value. I'm not saying that this particular instance is also a scam. I'm not even saying that their claim is false. But there is a very, very long history of claims like this - usually greeted with choruses of HUZZAH! ALL PROBLEMS ARE SOLVED! - that have, thus far, in the case of air vehicles, always proven false.

Again, this may be the time it's real. I don't know. But what I do know is that I can take the numbers they give and do some math on them, which I have done below. And the results of that math I find... questionable. Please do check it. I could have made errors. I could be wrong on some conversions. But energy is energy is energy, and if you can get it all into the same units - which I can here - you can make direct comparisons. And those comparisons do not make these de facto efficiency claims seem very reassuring to me.

Now, again, maybe this is the real thing. But I am not liking these numbers very much. Hopefully I am wrong not to like them and they are, in fact, valid. But with a century of air-fueled-cars scammage as background, some of us are gonna be real hesitant to take any claims around such inventions at face value until we get a lot more empirical data than we have seen as yet.

Soapbox Time

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

I'm gonna say exactly this much and leave it at this: If it's a fraud, it'll be shown to be a fraud pretty quickly. There are many more skeptical elements in the world than their used to be (American evangelicalism notwithstanding), and if it doesn't work, we'll find out.

But.

If it does work -- and, bluntly, it seems far too elaborate to bother with as a hoax and the world is too crazy for them to scam a business in another country -- if it does work, it'll be an exceptionally cool thing.

It may sound as if I'm ridiculously snarky in saying this, but... if you really don't think it'll work, contact them. Perhaps you have found something they have overlooked. Or perhaps you'll get a job with them. Or perhaps they'll show you how it can work. Or any of a number of other possibilities.

Because that, really, is what we are talking about here: possibilities.

I feel compelled to remind you of this video at YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4CBqRdaiik).

Re: Soapbox Time

[solarbird]

if you really don't think it'll work, contact them.
I'm not saying it doesn't work. I'm saying that what they are claiming requires very, very solid demonstration and explanation. They are making an extraordinary claim, and it's a claim others have made before. I remember that 2003 round another commenter mentioned. I also remember a previous round - another group - that went nowhere. I further remember a round of this being discussed - with much more reasonable numbers, quite frankly - in a more academic way, involving compressed nitrogen - in the mid-1990s. There are iterations of this going back to the 19th century, some of which are raw fraud, others of which are simply people being hopelessly optimistic (and, in many cases, bad at math).

Perhaps you have found something they have overlooked.
If they're overlooking basic thermodynamics, which is all I'm talking here, then I'm not going to be able to help them. My energy calculations here are very basic; I'm demonstrating their implicit efficiency claims in overt numeric form. That's all. This is what their statements - their website, the BBC news coverage - say. (Again, unless I've made an error. And I've made one invalid assumption that actually makes their case more, not less, unreasonable, in assuming they recover all 22kWh out of that compression system. They won't, because you can't, because you will have waste heat, period, end of story.) And given that, I find these numbers to be unlikely at best.

This doesn't mean they don't have a working engine; I'm sure they do. This does not mean they can't make a working car; they've apparently done so. This doesn't mean they can't make it into a production car; maybe they can. It doesn't even mean their numbers are wrong, but I find it difficult to see how you get there.

At 66kWh, I could see getting there. Even at 44kWh, I would be significantly less skeptical. But they say that they're getting 125 miles out of 22kWh electricity input to a compressor, and that means they're doing 26% better than the theoretical 100% efficiency maximum of the most fuel-efficient production vehicle ever shipped. I'm not saying that's impossible; I presume their car is a lot lighter (the record-holding car is the 1830lb Lupo 3L, according again to Wikipedia, which is still pretty heavy and is made of metal), which would help tremendously. Being all-carbon-fibre would help, and the engine has plastic parts, so this is reasonable. It's possible. But even with that, it's a hell of an energy claim they're making, and the kind that should not be accepted at anything approaching face value.

Look, I'm not trying to pick on anybody. I'm really not. I'm not even yelling fraud, because I don't know. All I've done is shown, in math, what they are actually claiming from an energy standpoint, and saying I got issues with it. Significant ones. If they have a production-capable vehicle and it ships, I suspect you'll see real-world numbers that place the energy costs significantly higher, which would be less of a deal if they weren't stressing the Damn Near Free aspect of the whole thing.

(Then we start getting into discussions about the energy grid buildout, but that's not hugely controversial. At face value, it's a lot more efficient - per kWh - than the most efficient true-EVs I've ever seen, which is good, 'cause I ran the numbers with those, and we need 7.2 times the capacity of the current grid's peak capacity in addition to the current grid's peak capacity to replace the automobile fleet we have now. That'll be spendy.)

[admnaismith.livejournal.com]

Hey, by all means, check the claims. I intend to defer to the judgment of the real scientists. It's not as if we're all claiming to know how this car was made, or rushing out to invest my retirement savings in Air Cars.

In fact, I fully expect that, assuming this is a workable car and not just a hoax, that there will be many, many bugs to work out before this becomes something that can be used like the cars we're used to. Also, that it may be better for metro areas than for, say, driving in Montana.

It's just that, shockwave sounded to me a lot less "I have some scientific suspicions" and a lot more "Your candidate for President is rich, therefore he has no business talking about the poor"

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

Sorry if I sounded as such. It's more my irritation that when we need real solutions to real problems, the snakesoil salesmen come out of the woodwork. As has been mentioned before, the compressed air car has been around since the 50s and gets trotted out everytime the price of gas goes up or the media deigns to look at ecological issues. It doesn't save the environment and it doesn't eliminate the need for power - you have to compress that air via some energy, since the magic compressed air fairy union 976 is on strike. An electric car has more range than even this thing and people complain about them. Beats me why folks break out the party gear for something that has less range, less performance, a much poorer record and no real savings.

Ideally, all cars in the near future should be required by law to be Series Hybrids. This is how nearly all locomotives are built, not because the shipping industry values the ecology, but because it saves them fuel. This can burn even less gas if you have it built as a plug-in hybrid, able to recharge some from the house power. Eventually the best solution would be solar cells on everyone's roof that splits water into Hydrogen and Oxygen via some undiscovered catalyst, and uses that hydrogen in fuel cells. But we don't have said solar splitting catalyst yet, so existing power systems will be the norm for the next ten years and we need to stretch them out as far as we can.

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

I am an engineer in RL. I do not believe utopia is achievable, though it has to be the goalline.

I also do not believe in rushing out and making matters worse instead of better, just so you can say you never have to burn a drop of gas. I assure you, unless you have a compressor in your own home and are powered by a nuclear wind or solar power plant, you'll be burning something to power it all. And it would royally suck if the entire fleet suddenly got half the economy it already does, just so we can say we're making a difference...

[solarbird]

I did some math. See below. I have, um, issues.

[palenoue.livejournal.com]

Okay, let's take this by the numbers:

1) power to the compressor: funny how people use this argument to imply, without any definition or allusion, that it will take just as much oil as it would running a gas guzzling SUV, or that any power used for the compressor causes the dirtiest, smelliest and most cancer-causing pollution known to man. Thing is, the compressors can be powered by solar, wind, water, temperature differences, tidal, biofuels, homemade moonshine, incinerated garbage, hamsters on wheels, etc. Right there you've got a big advantage due to diversity. Also, the generators running the compressors can be made a _lot_ more efficient, thus squeezing out 120 miles per gallon or better if you were to work up a comparison (as someone did once for using an efficient home generator to charge an electric car).

2) losses in converting to pistons: Ummmm, don't know how to break this to you, but _everything_ has losses when converting to motion with a piston. Singling out air engines as if they're the only ones who has losses will just make them depressed and gain weight and become unpopular. Besides, I thought it used a cyclical thingy to avoid pistons entirely, but I could be thinking of a different air car design, there have been a few that looked promising.

3) Getting weaker and weaker as you drive: That's only if you don't put any work into R&D. The designs that I know of have worked up a few ways to get optimum pressure to the engine regardless of the volume left. Unfortunately, the most efficient designs have also been the noisiest, a problem I've only seen mentioned by people who have actually ridden in one.

4) High pressure air bomb: Nope, not going to happen. There are numerous ways to design tanks and store high pressure air where any kind of puncture, from a bullet through the tank to detonating dynamite under the main valve, do not result in explosions nor shrapnel (well, not from the compressed air, though I'm sure the TNT tosses a few things around). The hydrogen crowd has done a _lot_ of research into high pressure container safety, and the air pressure they're talking about here is less than that.

5) Super hot air pressure: As someone who once had a temp job surrounded by highly compressed gasses of various types, I can assure you there will only be a little heat during refilling and it will disippitate quickly enough. What could be a problem is the cold from rapid decompression around the valves, especially if the air pumped in was humid. But I'm sure they've dealt with that problem already as it's something that pops up readily enough.

6) Refueling every 15 minutes: this is what all of that R&D money was spent on, getting the most miles per cubic inch of air. You _really_ think these things would get this kind of coverage if they had to be refueled every 15 minutes? You _really_ think nobody would notice such a glaring problem in all of the test drives and demonstrations?

I figure if this air engine really is ready for production and consumer sales, then we'll hear all of these false arguments against it from the big oil and auto companies, so we might as well start working on our rebuttles now.

[solarbird]

I did some energy calculations below. Please do check my math.