The car they don't want you to have.

[OUTSIDER]

I read an article in the Daily Mail today thats talking about a car made in france that runs on compressed air.

cost:- £6,000

Speed:- 68mph

Engine size :- 700cc 4 cylinder weighing 77lbs

Cost per refill :- £1 (yes one pound)

Time to refill :- 2 minutes at a station or fours hours at home.

Range:- 124 miles

so if theres a car out there that can do all this then why are the car companies pushing fuel cell cars so hard, could it be that anybody can make compressed air but you need a refining plant to make hydrogen.

lets face it if the big car companies put their minds to it and started to make compressed air cars the oil companies would be fucked.

 

[Carp]

Reality

Yeah. And yesterday I read about a car that is powered by hydrogen fusion. Doesn't make it real. Any supporting evidence for this fantastic claim?

 

[Azwed]

You can run motors on compressed air very easily. Most of the tools and equipment at my shop runs on compressed air. The problem is no car that runs on compressed air could ever be very large or have very much range. It would be a good commuter car no doubt but not very pratical for anything else.

You still have to have a motor to compress the air though. Can't get energy for free so some type of motor, gas/electric/diesel etc. must compress the air first into a tank so that the air has potential energy.


Compressed air is also highly corrosive and will destroy the inside of a steel air tank if left in it too long. We drain our tank everynight to drain the water out of it and limit corrosion.

Not saying it could not work just saying that it would be a very limited market.

 

[OUTSIDER]

Re: Reality

Yeah. And yesterday I read about a car that is powered by hydrogen fusion. Doesn't make it real. Any supporting evidence for this fantastic claim?

LOL, I know this sounds like bullshit but but the car itself appeared on a well respected science programme over here called "Tomorrows World" and I swear this is not a wind up.

 

[OUTSIDER]

You can run motors on compressed air very easily. Most of the tools and equipment at my shop runs on compressed air. The problem is no car that runs on compressed air could ever be very large or have very much range. It would be a good commuter car no doubt but not very pratical for anything else.

You still have to have a motor to compress the air though. Can't get energy for free so some type of motor, gas/electric/diesel etc. must compress the air first into a tank so that the air has potential energy.


Compressed air is also highly corrosive and will destroy the inside of a steel air tank if left in it too long. We drain our tank everynight to drain the water out of it and limit corrosion.

Not saying it could not work just saying that it would be a very limited market.

the fuel tank is made from glass fibre and I'll take two minutes to fill the tank over ten hours any day, they both use the same power station but one only uses it for two minutes.

 

[Worm]

edited for double post oops.

 

[Worm]

Market forces will decide when alternative fuel cars become the norm. People here in the U.S. like their internal combustion engines and until gas prices either skyrocket or a vehicle comes out that can do everything an internal combustion engine does that is comparatively priced I don't think thats gonna change. When there is demand and profit to be made the car companies will supply them. There is no conspiracy.

 

[Ishmael]

As Az pointed out, the devils in the details.

Each stage of energy conversion losses efficiency. The refinery or fuel rod fabrication facility that produced the fuel for the electric generation plant was not 100% efficient. The power plant that produced the electricity was not 100% efficient in the conversion. The same with the compressor that was run with the electicity produced at the plant. You reach a point of deminishing returns. Which makes me wonder about the useful pay load of a vehicle that can be refueled for 1 pound sterling.

Also as Az pointed out, at pressure the air tank is a bomb. High pressure air tanks are extremely heavy and dangerous if not properly maintained. And most people don't do a very good job maintaining the automobile that they currently have.

I'm not against the idea at all, but compressed air engines have been around forever. Any 2 cycle engine can be converted to a compressed air engine with little modification. In essence a steam engine is a compressed air engine. The only difference being in the means of compression.

I'm just a little skeptical of the practicality of the whole thing. There are no free lunches.

Ishmael

 

[QuickDuck]

Also, electric cars have been around for a while now, but as i understand it, they have never really been commercially viable.

My ex used to believe in a conspiracy theory that someone had invented an engine that ran on water, but that the oil companies had made him "dissappear".

While thats pretty far fetched, gotta admitt that having a car like that would probably help solve alot of the world's pollution problems, as well as being alot cheaper to run (bet it would cost a fortune to buy though).

Also keep in mind that cars that run on LPG are starting to appear in bigger numbers (here in Australia anyway), since fuel prices hit the 85cents per litre and higher marks, so the fuel companies are already seeing a lowly shifting tide.... just not a very big one.

/wave
QuickDuck

 

[Carp]

Dead horse power

Dead horse power
OK, I don't want to beat this horse to death, but I really did read an article about a fusion powered car. Dated 1979. Put out by a small town here in Minnesota who sent 28 guys out to take a look at it. They thought it was pretty nifty. Of course, the car was unavailable to drive that day, all they got to look at was a stationary prototype.

I started a little research into this- found this web sit:
http://www.zeropollution.com/body_aboutus.html (the guys making the car in question)

of more interest is : http://www.howstuffworks.com/question133.htm
but no real resolution. I believe, for no other reason than it is what I believe, that the energy density would be too low. And I flat-out don’t believe that you could recharge the thing in 2 minutes at a filling station.

Now, for an unapologetic hijack: Have any of you looked at lifters? They are electric dealies that run on electricity- if you have an asymmetric capacitor, hook it up to high voltage, it generates thrust for a currently unexplained reason. (No, ion wind does not appear to be the source of the thrust)

(Edited to remove all those embarrassing typos.

 

[Ishmael]

Re: Dead horse power

Now, for an unapologetig hyjak: Have any of you looked at lifters? They are electric dealies that run on electricity- if you have an asymetric capacitor, hook it up to high voltage, it generates thrust for a currently unexplained reason. (No, ion wind does not appear to be the source of the thrust)

Not really a hijack.

Yep, the concept has been around for years. It was applied to speakers once. The famous KLH-9's electrostatic speakers. Huge, expensive, and notorioulsy inefficient. But damn, nothing could reproduce sound like those puppies.

Ishmael

 

[Carp]

really

I know the concept has been around for a number of years, but how did this improve the quality of sound from speakers?

 

[Spinaroonie]

There are lots of cars they don't want us to have....

Solar powered car...

Compressed air car...

I saw one that used frozen liquid oxygen or hydrogen or something

The ever popular in some communities hempseed car.

The recycled vegtable oil car

Should we move on from oil? Yes. Do they want us to? No. Will we move someday? Yes- Either by consumer demand, or necessity.

 

[Ishmael]

Re: really

I know the concept has been around for a number of years, but how did this improve the quality of sound from speakers?

Electro-magnetic speakers operate by moving a large mass, the magnet attached to the cone. Electro-statics operated by warping the plate of a capacitor which could be of realtively low mass. Also, because of the nature of a coil vs a capacitor power was almost instantanious.

But as I said, no free lunches. The KLH-9's were 6 feet tall, 2 feet wide and 3 inches thick. They required about 200 watts per speaker to really get the best out of them.

Ishmael

 

[tenyari]

We know Fusion is real, we know it can be made to work.

After all, unless you live in London or San Francisco you need only look up during the day to see it in action.

The problem I have with the idea of a fusion powered car in 1979 though is that as yet no human has been able to verifyingly reproduce the fusion procees.

As for alternate energy source vehicles; Toyota and Hinda both have well selling Hybrid gas-electric cars on the market.

These items are proving the market potential, doubtless fully electric will follow in due time.

Of course, the production of electricity is rarely a clean process.

 

[Carp]

Fusion, hydrogen, sugar and electricity

Tenyari- I meant in now way to question the existence of fusion, just the existence, today, of a compressed-air powered car.

I read an interesting article on Friday, and followed it up with some superficial Web research which I won't duplicate here unless someone wants me to do their work (again :-( )A number of scientist types have found that it is relatively easy to separate a sucrose (sugar) solution into H2 and CO2. The process uses platinum as a catalyst. The Hydrogen could be run through a fuel cell, and the CO2 dumped into the atmosphere. But wait, you say, green house gas. But, I say, only CO2 that was removed from the air by the growth of the plant that grew the sugar. Seems like a real winner to me. Another interesting speculation was that many food processors that deal with sugar have large quantities of sucrose in their waste stream. This process appears to be faster and more efficient than using bacteria to process the sugars to create methane.

 

[Ishmael]

[B
The problem I have with the idea of a fusion powered car in 1979 though is that as yet no human has been able to verifyingly reproduce the fusion procees.

[/B]

Fusion by the hands of man was first achieved in 1982 by L-6 division at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratories under a project named "Antares".

While the results were a net loss, more power was used to produce the fusion reaction than the reaction itself produced, it was the first demonstration of fusion power that did not require an atomic bomb to initiate the process.

It was the results of this demonstration that has pointed further research in the direction of Tokomack magnetic containment bottles.

You are twenty years behind science.

Ishmael

 

[RhumbRunner13]

Here are two links on the "e Volution". It is reportedly going on sale this year in South Africa, with plants and future sales in other countries.

I'm just a little sceptical. Scuba tanks are usually 3000# tanks and are deadly when they explode. A 300 Bar tank the same size would be, I think, 2 1/4 times as powerful. I'm not sure of the size conversion from 30 cf to 79 gallons, but I think it is substantial. I don't want to be in the neighborhood when one goes off!

Technology could solve that problem and a few other minor things like compression heating and expansion freezing but if a 30 cf scuba tank costs $5 to $10 to refill, who is going to fill a 79 gallon tank for $1.50 to a pressure 1 1/2 times the scuba tank?

I can drive my vehicle (7 passenger with air) 230 miles at 70 MPH on $12 worth of gas, and still have over 200 miles range left. What is the advantage to driving a 1500 lb car around in the heat that MUST be home with in 100 miles?

Rhumb

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/988265.stm

http://www.howstuffworks.com/air-car1.htm

 

[Starfish]

Re: Reality

Yeah. And yesterday I read about a car that is powered by hydrogen fusion. Doesn't make it real. Any supporting evidence for this fantastic claim?

Uh, It isn't hydrogen 'fusion'.

There is a lot of technology that allows us to use hydrogen as fuel, and there are already test cars being run in Europe. I guess I don't know what you are refering to.

There are other ways to burn hydrogen cleanly.


Here is a site I came upon...

http://reporter.leeds.ac.uk/483/s3.htm

 

[pabloback]

rudolph diesel [inventor of the compression ignition or diesel engine] was assinated by oil company executives worried that his invention was too fuel efficient and would affect their profits
hydrogen will probably become the alternative to fossil fuels
most cars in brazil run on either rape seed oil or alcohol made from sugar

 

[LovetoGiveRoses]

Re: Re: Dead horse power

Not really a hijack.

Yep, the concept has been around for years. It was applied to speakers once. The famous KLH-9's electrostatic speakers. Huge, expensive, and notorioulsy inefficient. But damn, nothing could reproduce sound like those puppies.

Ishmael

My parents bought a couple of those, they sure are nice.

 

[LovetoGiveRoses]

Hydrogen is used to power fuel cells. The "exhaust" is pure water. It's a promising technology, but not quite mature yet.

One of the problems, like compressed air, is that it tends to blow up when there's an accident.

 

[OUTSIDER]

Hydrogen is used to power fuel cells. The "exhaust" is pure water. It's a promising technology, but not quite mature yet.

One of the problems, like compressed air, is that it tends to blow up when there's an accident.

With regards to the tank "bomb" problem the inventers claim their glass fibre tank ruptures in a way that measns it doesn't go BOOM so much as making a farty noise.



On another tack have any of you guys ever heard of gas speakers....they used the fact that a flame willl pass a current to produce sound, you pass the current throught the flame which then vibrates and bingo you have sound, and 3D sound at that !!

 

[Ishmael]

rudolph diesel [inventor of the compression ignition or diesel engine] was assinated by oil company executives worried that his invention was too fuel efficient and would affect their profits
hydrogen will probably become the alternative to fossil fuels
most cars in brazil run on either rape seed oil or alcohol made from sugar

Otto Diesel died in 1891. What the fuck are you talking about?

Ishmael

 

[RhumbRunner13]

rudolph diesel [inventor of the compression ignition or diesel engine] was assinated by oil company executives worried that his invention was too fuel efficient and would affect their profits
hydrogen will probably become the alternative to fossil fuels
most cars in brazil run on either rape seed oil or alcohol made from sugar

I'm not a blind defender of oil companies, but I can't let a patently false statement go unchallenged.

Diesel was not killed because the oil companies were afraid of his engine. He was already quite successful and had become quite rich with his inventions, including the Diesel engine. He perhaps was not a very good businessman and was going broke. His body was found in the English Channel and evidence indicated he committed suicide. Here is a link to his biography.

http://members.shaw.ca/diesel-duck/library/articles/rudolph_diesel.htm

Let's put this vast conspiracy to bed.

Rhumb