AirPod Concept Car Runs on Compressed Air

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So... why not hook up the charging stations to water-mains. They always have fast flowing water and could easily power a air compressor pump with an efficient turbine/alternator. More and more people are looking to small hydro power, heck you can make your own out of PVC pipe and a 5gallon bucket.

Fungi
 
[citation][nom]funguseater[/nom]So... why not hook up the charging stations to water-mains. They always have fast flowing water and could easily power a air compressor pump with an efficient turbine/alternator. More and more people are looking to small hydro power, heck you can make your own out of PVC pipe and a 5gallon bucket.Fungi[/citation]


Because a few of those and the water would no longer be "fast flowing". It flows well because of the lack of obstructions, adding electric turbines would effectively kill that. Nothing is free.
 
[citation][nom]Elwenil[/nom]Because a few of those and the water would no longer be "fast flowing". It flows well because of the lack of obstructions, adding electric turbines would effectively kill that. Nothing is free.[/citation]

Yeah makes sense, I gotta put down the Bong. We all use creeks in my region as there is no shortage of year round creeks here on West Coast Canada. I know of 3 people just on my block using home hydro and it just got stuck in my head. I even made a mini turbine out of CD's that can charge a 12v battery (slowly 😉

on topic : here is another Compressed air engine, apparently works with only 1PSI to overcome friction... and %95 efficient, seems a little unbelievable though.
 
Electric car are more efficient than air cars , but air cars have one advantage- they can be refueled for about 5 minutes(given a proper instalation) , whlile electric will need at least an hour, and lets not forget that metals used in batterys ARE HIGHLY TOXIC. Shure the metal comes form some third world country with life expectancy abaut 45 but that is not what you want to hear when you buy "green" car.

And before i forget , that is the only propulstion where driving with ac on is more eco than windshilds open. :)
 
[citation][nom]antegravity[/nom]This car really doesn't run on air. It runs on whatever compressed the air. Whether that is electricity from a power plant on the grid fueled by coal or wind turbines. Even batteries have an energy and material cost from their industrial production.[/citation]

A gasoline car engine efficiency rate is 20-30% a rest is wasted energy, in an electric plant , efficiency rates are over 60-70%, a car like this one you will spend a lot less money on fuel and are independent of ever-growing fuel prices.
 
If this was actually a good technology, the oil companies would have assassinated the person responsible for this technology. When someone creates alternative energy, and mysteriously dies, then look into what he/she created. I don't even have my tinfoil hat on right now, look at that :)

Air cars are stupid. Another extra step in the energy process, losing efficiency. May as well go electric. If we have electric cars with solar power, were set. Sure battery production produces waste, but if they were recharged by solar, I'm uneducatedly sure they would be less harmful and less expensive than gasoline.

I do however feel for the grease heads. The ones that turn restaurant oil into bio fuel. They work pretty hard to get that going. Making vegetable oil doesn't produce very much waste, people get paid to cook food with it, we get fat, and someone drives around on it, instead of it getting sent to the giant hill of garbage that we als drive by on the way to work everyday.
 
Solar may sound nice but even if you covered the whole car's painted area with 15-20% efficient cells you would only get 1-2kW net power on a perfect day, barely enough to run the car's AC. Unless the car's profile, tires, suspension, etc. are all optimized to minimize drag and weight (which may make it look and handle like a UFO), you would likely still have to plug it in to finish topping off the charge.

Since it takes around 100HP to give a typical car decent acceleration characteristics, hybrid something+electric is going to stay for the foreseeable future since that level of power on pure-electric is prohibitively expensive and sacrifices too much range.

On the bright side, hybrid gasoline+electric does improve fuel efficiency by 2-3X depending on usage by enabling the gasoline engine to only run within its highest efficiency range and only when needed.
 
I'd like to see one of these with built in pedal inside so you can add pressure as you go, or pump up the pump if you are out/low... sure it'll take a long time compared to an electric pump but hey every little bit helps.
 
[citation][nom]belardo[/nom]Aircars like these have been around for years. They typically have two tanks. They make them big enough to hold 2~4 people without a problem.Cool thing about an AIR-CAR, is that there is plenty of AIR, its just compressed... And in a sense, it should be able to run itself.[/citation]
It can't run itself - that would be perpetual motion

If it runs on a battery charge then it runs on the source of that electricity... which would be Coal or Natural Gas in the United states... which is far from environmentally friendly.
 
[citation][nom]antegravity[/nom]This car really doesn't run on air. It runs on whatever compressed the air. Whether that is electricity from a power plant on the grid fueled by coal or wind turbines. Even batteries have an energy and material cost from their industrial production.[/citation]

And if you go back far enough, all of that energy came from the sun - heat, water cycles, energy collected in plant matter, eaten by dinosaurs who died and turned into the oil and coal we use... So, using your same logic, I could argue that *everything* is solar powered.

Yes, you are correct in that something needs to power the compressor to compress the air - but the vehicle itself is directly driven by that compressed air being fed into an engine - therefore, an air-powered car.
 
[citation][nom]SmaugTD[/nom]A gasoline car engine efficiency rate is 20-30% a rest is wasted energy, in an electric plant , efficiency rates are over 60-70%, a car like this one you will spend a lot less money on fuel and are independent of ever-growing fuel prices.[/citation]
Using only information from Wikipedia:
Gasoline engines are 15% efficient. Gas => Motion.
Diesel engines are 20% efficient. Gas => Motion.
Electric engines are 80% efficient. Battery => Motion.
Fossil fuel power stations are 85% of the worlds energy so I will use that for the calculations.
The record peak efficiency of a CCGT plant is just under 60%, but typical efficiency of FF plants is around 30%. This isn't even counting the loss in getting the electricity to your house.
Charging a car battery is also 80% efficient. Wall => Battery.
The efficiency of an electric car charged by the most efficient plant during peak efficiency is 38%, but charged in a more typical setting it's half that at 19%. Gas => Electricity.
TL;DR: Electric cars aren't really more efficient than fossil fuel powered cars in today's world. A turbocharged diesel engine is easily more efficient than an electric car.
 
[citation][nom]InvalidError[/nom]You cannot make a self-powered air-car since the air-compression/decompression process is very inefficient. On top of that, you have mechanical losses due to friction, rolling losses in the tires/suspension, aerodynamic losses from drag, more losses from braking, etc. so no matter how efficient you manage to make everything, you still need some form of external energy source to top off the compressed air tank.[/citation]
^ This.

Everybody reads about these and thinks "Ohh, it runs on air -- it MUST be earth friendly!" The thing is, the air is not the energy source; it's the energy storage. The energy needed to compress the air is still coming from the same old filthy electicity sources we've been using all along. (Those are the things that really need revolutionizing.) To top it off, air compressors are among the more inefficient electrical devices, so this is actually quite wasteful.
 
[citation][nom]theabsinthehare[/nom]For the car to compress the air it runs on via its own air supply would result in a perpetual motion machine. This is impossible. See "Entropy."[/citation] I'm aware its not perfect... the air itself is still escaping, so why not try to re-capture it? Also, it doesn't take much to re-fill the air tanks. The AIR car is still a very low pollution car compared to gas. Even EVs still require power from the grid.
 
[citation][nom]belardo[/nom]I'm aware its not perfect... the air itself is still escaping, so why not try to re-capture it? Also, it doesn't take much to re-fill the air tanks. The AIR car is still a very low pollution car compared to gas. Even EVs still require power from the grid.[/citation]


I think you are missing the point. The air is not the energy source, it's just the storage medium. Think of it as a really inefficient battery. You put electricity or fuel into a compressor to compress the air in the car's tanks, it runs off the compressed air in the tanks. Re-claiming the air means you would need an on-board compressor that would have to run on something. It can't run off itself, meaning the compressed air stored in the tanks cannot power the car and then power a compressor also. It's way too inefficient for that even if compressed air power itself was efficient, which it is not. If the compressed air could power a compressor to replace the air it uses in a 1:1 ratio, it would be perpetual energy, which cannot exist. And to ask it to do the same as well as power a vehicle is beyond comprehension. Compressing air is not easy so to even ask it to reclaim a small amount of compressed air would waste a lot of the stored energy in the tank and severely cut the vehicle's speed and range. You may as well just cut out the middle man and buy and electric car.
 
If everyone was as dedicated to saving and preserving our planet as MDI, we would be in a happier world. I believe that they should be encouraged, not scolded.
 
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