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Wednesday, January 16, 2008 The Air Car Preps for MarketSome still question the vehicle's chances of success, despite a boost from India. By Tyler Hamilton
A French-designed car that's propelled by compressed air and claims speeds of more than 60 miles per hour is expected to go into commercial production as early as this summer, although skeptics of the technology aren't holding their breath. Using compressed air, they argue, may mean zero tailpipe emissions, but it's unlikely to provide enough range or speed to appeal to the masses, particularly in North America. "Compressed air does not contain much energy--that's the killer," says Larry Rinek, senior research analyst for automotive technologies at consultancy Frost & Sullivan. "This is more a nice garage project for a Popular Science subscriber." But the dream lives on. Motor Development International (MDI), based near Nice, France, has developed several prototypes of its Compressed Air Technology (CAT) car since its first engine was created 14 years ago. Now company founder Guy Negre, an aeronautics engineer who developed a high-performance racing engine for Formula 1 in the late 1980s, is counting on India's largest carmaker, Tata Motors, to bring his highly anticipated Air Car to market later this year. The Air Car was supposed to hit the streets years ago, but its release always seems just around the corner. MDI announced in 2002 that the cars would be used to replace taxis in Mexico City, but nothing resulted. Tata's involvement this time around, combined with the fact that oil recently hit $100 a barrel, could change the game. India's largest automaker announced last February that it had struck a deal with MDI to further develop and refine Negre's compressed-air engine technology, with the intention of producing and selling the emission-free cars in India. It has since been reported that Tata invested nearly $30 million in MDI as part of the agreement. "The recent manufacturing push is in response to the contract that MDI signed with Tata," confirmed Kevin Haydon, a spokesman for Zero Pollution Motors, based in New Paltz, NY. He says that the company plans to manufacture CAT vehicles in parts of the United States around 2010, through a license with MDI. Zero Pollution has even entered the car in the multicity Automotive X Prize competition, where in 2009 more than 30 teams--including electric carmakers Tesla Motors, Phoenix Motorcars, and Malcolm Bricklin's Visionary Vehicles--will compete on the fuel efficiency of their vehicle designs. The Air Car may do better than fuel-cell cars, but experts say that using grid power to charge a battery-powered electric vehicle is much more efficient than using electricity to compress and store the same amount of energy in a tank. "The main problem is that air gets hot when you compress it, so much of the energy input goes into raising the temperature of the air as you try to raise the pressure," explains Doug Nelson, a professor of mechanical engineering and an expert on advanced vehicle systems at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. |
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Comments
Gaetano Marano on 01/16/2008 at 1:40 AM
55
the zero-emissions/zero-fuel air-compressed car is a dream that (I hope) may become commercial
to-day's electric cars are more realistic and already are commercial products, but still have a lo range
then, the only mid-term solution could be the "cellphoneCAR":
http://www.gaetanomarano.it/articles/033cellphoneCAR.html
.
gabrielg01 on 01/16/2008 at 2:43 AM
294
Handshake on 01/16/2008 at 3:15 AM
7
P.S.
The idea for a “air car” is very SMART, and has some advantages (refill of the car can’t be made “at home”, the “fuel” for this car must be bougth like you buy oil for standard machines)
Electric cars don’t have this “advantages” because electricity is something that everyone has at home.
kearns on 01/16/2008 at 11:18 AM
24
I love the part about getting power on the upstroke as well as the downstroke!
andraon on 05/05/2008 at 8:31 PM
3
wf on 01/16/2008 at 11:30 AM
14
This article explores the potential for vehicles powered solely by compressed air and hybrid vehicles using compressed air supplemented by a gasoline engine. An additional area of interest, however, is whether compressed air technology is useful in a hybrid vehicle where a conventional fuel engine is the primary power source and the compressed air serves as the supplementary power source. In other words, it would be very much akin to today's hybrid cars, except that compressed air is used as the dynamic energy storage medium as opposed to electric batteries. The big benefit is potential cost savings over the gas-electric hybrid approach.
Research has shown the value of this concept. For more information, see: http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/001552.html
panamablaine on 05/20/2008 at 1:59 PM
1
scottaye on 01/16/2008 at 4:57 PM
4
Go strip 75% of the weight out your current car and you'll improve mileage, just don't expect to live through a crash.
Monsterboy on 01/17/2008 at 1:13 PM
57
mcberta2 on 01/18/2008 at 12:31 PM
2
The streets are always packed and the average vehicle speed is just a little faster than a bicycle/scooter.
mkogrady on 01/17/2008 at 3:05 PM
91
Spin up the flywheel - disengage the airtank - recharge with solar and repeat as needed.
DJTal on 01/20/2008 at 5:45 AM
114
dgholstein on 01/20/2008 at 11:19 AM
2
If we were to fill up with liquid air, the fill process would be little more difficult than with current liquid fuels, actually, a bit safer since there is no chance for fire or environmental pollution (consider the tanker disaster in Oakland).
As we "run" the car, we'd pass ambient air through a heat exchanger, forcing the air through a phase transition and heating it up as much as possible with ambient conditions -- leaving cooled air in our wake. We would, in effect, be satisfying the first law of thermodynamics, to it's most fundamental implementation; we'd be propelling the car with ambient heat, reducing the temperature of the air in the wake of the car.
As juvenile as Ayn Rand (in Atlas Shrugged) was with her, "extracting electricity from the air", in effect, we kind of can do something similar.
Now, we just need to build a frost-less heat exchanger!
bill michaels on 08/03/2008 at 11:33 PM
1
bill michaels; founder/president DARLAP NFP
zeddy08 on 01/21/2008 at 1:17 AM
1
Efficiency is the make-or-break of any energy technology.
I see this process as an energy transport system consisting of 3 phases: Compressing the air, transporting the air, and recovering the energy.
Air compressors are notoriously inefficient. as the article states, a lot of energy is wasted as heat.
The air must be transported to the place where it is dispensed. Compressed air has very little energy per unit weight (c.f. fuel, for example), so therefore this part of the process must be inefficient.
Air motors are just as inefficient as compressors (being essentially the reverse process).
If it uses grid power to compress the air in the first place, then it simply moves the pollution to another place (the power station), and as it's inefficient, it produces more pollution than an equivalent fuel-powered car would.
Junk.
DDHv on 07/05/2008 at 8:51 PM
1
MDIs car has about half the efficiency of a PHEV or BEV (electrical part only), range is about the same, first cost is half. There aren't resource constraints. I'd like an E-volt, but for commuting 90 miles daily round trip, first cost is more critical. $20,000 would cover years of trips, more than are likely, especially if I can talk the boss into providing the electricity while I'm at work! ;-))
The dual fuel range extending feature is be nice also.
catvolution on 02/25/2008 at 4:15 PM
1