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

[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.