AirCar the new fantasy-will a Hummer buy it ? part 2
So after some thought here is what i think on the Air car drama(follow up of aircar article-part 1)
The nearest competitor for the air powered engine is the battery powered engine and both still seem impractical to me (we all know what happened to Reva that was launched in India) for the following reasons stated
First let’s kick some air-engine butt
In the enthusiasm we may think that Air-engine might be revolutionary but if you think about it energy has just been displaced. It takes a lot of coal, nuclear or hydroelectric power to compress normal air.
Also the "refueling" process could be elaborated on. The embedded video states the car would be "refueled" by an air compressor at a station. This would mean the air compressor at the station is connected to the electrical grid.
One has to calculate the efficiency of the air compressor to truly understand the operational costs of this system.
This is a link to a PDF about air compressor efficiency:
http://www.p2pays.org/ref/32/31312.pdf
Here is a more in-depth article discussing the associated costs with operating air compressors:
http://www.mntap.umn.edu/energy/82-CompAir.htm
Quoting the above linked article:"Compressed air is one of the most expensive uses of energy in a manufacturing plant. About eight horsepower of electricity is used to generate one horsepower of compressed air."
Just from that one statement I would tend to favor an all electric vehicle.
Imagine one million compressed air cars. Take the tanks from every single one and create one huge compressed air "super tank" and one huge "super compressor" to do the work. Now imagine one million electric cars. Take all these batteries and create one "super battery" and one massive rectified transformer for converting the grid AC to DC for charging the "super battery. Now we have a lumped element circuit model.
Both systems will have heat losses at their energy conversion points. The compressed air system will be noisy yet light, the battery system will be quiet yet heavy.
Also, our supplies of cadmium and nickel are not enough to supply battery-powered cars for the entire earth. So which one will we choose? Hmm.
Follow up on part 3
The nearest competitor for the air powered engine is the battery powered engine and both still seem impractical to me (we all know what happened to Reva that was launched in India) for the following reasons stated
First let’s kick some air-engine butt
In the enthusiasm we may think that Air-engine might be revolutionary but if you think about it energy has just been displaced. It takes a lot of coal, nuclear or hydroelectric power to compress normal air.
Also the "refueling" process could be elaborated on. The embedded video states the car would be "refueled" by an air compressor at a station. This would mean the air compressor at the station is connected to the electrical grid.
One has to calculate the efficiency of the air compressor to truly understand the operational costs of this system.
This is a link to a PDF about air compressor efficiency:
http://www.p2pays.org/ref/32/31312.pdf
Here is a more in-depth article discussing the associated costs with operating air compressors:
http://www.mntap.umn.edu/energy/82-CompAir.htm
Quoting the above linked article:"Compressed air is one of the most expensive uses of energy in a manufacturing plant. About eight horsepower of electricity is used to generate one horsepower of compressed air."
Just from that one statement I would tend to favor an all electric vehicle.
Imagine one million compressed air cars. Take the tanks from every single one and create one huge compressed air "super tank" and one huge "super compressor" to do the work. Now imagine one million electric cars. Take all these batteries and create one "super battery" and one massive rectified transformer for converting the grid AC to DC for charging the "super battery. Now we have a lumped element circuit model.
Both systems will have heat losses at their energy conversion points. The compressed air system will be noisy yet light, the battery system will be quiet yet heavy.
Also, our supplies of cadmium and nickel are not enough to supply battery-powered cars for the entire earth. So which one will we choose? Hmm.
Follow up on part 3
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