This seems like an eco-dream come true, a car the runs on air developed in India. I’ve seen stories on this since 2008, but have yet to see the car hit market. Now the claim is in August 2012.
I don’t think you’ll see IPCC chairman Rajenda Pachauri driving one of these though, since he has been prone to booking posh 5 star hotel suites and won’t even drive the electric car he has. And like an electric car, that energy to charge the air tank with compressed air has to come from someplace, and that someplace if you are connected to the grid is likely fossil fuels, nuclear, or perhaps hydro. Though, with no fuel taxes, it might be a hit with anti-tax crusaders. With a claimed top speed of 60mph and range 185 miles, it should be enough to overcome the range anxiety of electric cars, and there’s no worry about battery fires or having to replace the expensive battery pack in 2-4 years. Whether it will ever be seen in the USA will of course depend on its crash worthiness. And when there is a crash, will it do this?
Story submitted by George Lawson
What is this? ‘Alison Italo Aus’
Will it be the next big thing?
Tata Motors of India thinks so.
What will the Oil Companies do to stop it?
It is an auto engine that runs on air. That’s right; air not gas or diesel or electric but just the air around us. Take a look.
Tata Motors of India has scheduled the Air Car to hit Indian streets by August 2012
The Air Car, developed by ex-Formula One engineer Guy N. For Luxembourg-based MDI, uses compressed air to push its engine’s pistons and make the car go.
The Air Car, called the “Mini CAT” could cost around 365,757 rupees in India or $8,177 US.
The Mini CAT which is a simple, light urban car, with a tubular chassis, a body of fiberglass that is glued not welded and powered by compressed air. A Microprocessor is used to control all electrical functions of the car. One tiny radio transmitter sends instructions to the lights, turn signals and every other electrical device on the car. Which are not many.
The temperature of the clean air expelled by the exhaust pipe is between 0-15 degrees below zero, which makes it suitable for use by the internal air conditioning system with no need for gases or loss of power.
There are no keys, just an access card which can be read by the car from your pocket. According to the designers, it costs less than 50 rupees per 100 KM, that’s about a tenth the cost of a car running on gas. It’s mileage is about double that of the most advanced electric car, a factor which makes it a perfect choice for city motorists. The car has a top speed of 105 KM per hour or 60 mph and would have a range of around 300 km or 185 miles between refuels. Refilling the car will take place at adapted gas stations with special air compressors. A fill up will only take two to three minutes and costs approximately 100 rupees and the car will be ready to go another 300 kilometers.
This car can also be filled at home with it’s on board compressor. It will take 3-4 hours to refill the tank, but it can be done while you sleep.
Because there is no combustion engine, changing the 1 liter of vegetable oil is only necessary every 50,000 KM or 30,000 miles. Due to its simplicity, there is very little maintenance to be done on this car.
This Air Car almost sounds too good to be true. We’ll see in August 2012 if it is.
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Ben Hern says:
January 31, 2012 at 10:03 am
(consider the location of the clutch pedal in relation to the gearbox in your conventional car and explain how driving the the left hand side of the car is anything other than a compromise before retorting that the sensible parts of the Commonwealth and Japan have it wrong).</i?
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Sorry Bud, I would like to be able to say this vehicle is decent, but everything I see says, POS.
As far a clutch pedal location a car's clutch pedal actuates a cable or a hydraulic cylinder both of which are flexible right hand drive or left hand drive won't have the slightest difference in how well or efficiently this simple system will work. It's no more or less a compromise either way. Also some cars have conventionally mounted engines, some cars have transverse mounted engines. Anyway most cars sold in North America are have automatic trans.
With respect to the trifles about the car needing to be light owing to it’s feeble powerplant, tell me why an F1 racing car is featherlight despite it’s powerful V8 powerplant? Adding lightness is in no way to be criticised, it is in fact sound design practice and very long overdue in automotive circles.
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The car has a claimed 24hp. That’s qualifies as feeble. Comparing the TaTa to a very specialized race-car, which is more a-kin to a Go-Kart than to a conventional car is just silly. Power to weight ratio is of utmost importance in a race car. However, in a convetional passenger car this characteristic takes a back seat to other necessities. Look at the roads your average car weighs in at about 3500lbs. Since most car models actually gain weight over the course of their existence from model year to model year it seems like the public is demanding features and attributes to cars that add weight. Nobody is going to give up their features in favor of this golf cart, sorry.
Bert Feldon says:
January 31, 2012 at 11:25 am
There is a lot of negativity here. The system being developed by Tata for this vehicle is licenced by a French inventor who had been running his prototypes around for some time.
Apparently, Tata turned negative on the system. It seems to have been scrubbed from their web site. The French inventor is on his own – for now – and seeking investors. See http://www.mdi.lu/english/index.php.
A few things not mentioned yet:
1) that cold air is REALLY cold coming out of the tank/exhaust. Icing is a severe problem.
2) The air first compressed into the tank is going to be hot, but gradually cool through diffusion. Managing that is tricky. Assuming it’s at ambient before use, see #1. It’s in effect being expanded by heat grabbed from the surrounding air, so there must be VERY efficient warming as it enters the cylinders. A hot climate is recommended.
3) It’s LOUD. There exist forklifts etc. for factory floors using this system, and the cylinders really bang away. Think compressed air impact tools, like jackhammers.
P.S. to above: the tank cools dramatically as pressure is reduced. This robs power, so the tank needs to grab heat from the environment. Repeat: a hot climate is recommended.
It will be interesting to see what happens if one of these cars, with freshly charged air cylinders , gets into an accident that compromises the structural integrity of one or more air cylinders. Batteries and gasoline cares are potential fire hazards but will not release ALL of the stored energy all at once. That is not true for compressed gas; this thing is a potential explosion/missile hazard on wheels.
Another pipe dream. As others have noted, compressed air at any pressure that can be safely handled in a consumer product has a very low energy density compared even to modern batteries, let alone liquid fuel. Standard SCUBA tanks are filled to 3000 psi (about 200 bar) and must pass a safety pressure test at 5000 psi every 5 years in the US (4 in the UK). The safety test involves putting them in a water bath and measuring (via Archimedes principle), how much they expand when filled to the test pressure. Automotive air storage tanks would likewise have to be certified regularly, at least in any jurisdiction which imposes the same requirement on SCUBA tanks (in the US all compressed gas tanks must be certified and inspected).
The *only* advantage of a compressed-air car is it shifts the pollution emission point from the car on the road (presumably in an urban location) to the central power plant (presumably remote from urban population). They don’t have the range, the power, or the convenience of internal combustion vehicles. The practical recovery efficiency is only somewhat better than 50%, so you’re net using more energy (burning more fuel) as well.
You would get essentially the same pollution reduction benefit by running on LNG or LPG, which are much easier to handle (container-wise) than highly compressed air.
There is work on grid-scale compressed air energy storage (CAES), but that is using industrial size compressors and air turbines and large underground caverns. One reference gave the storage pressure as 750 psi. It makes sense mostly because there are more suitable caverns than there are pumped hydro locations. If you have to build the storage tanks it makes no sense at all.
If you look at the reference table of energy storage by volume a previous commenter linked to, the futility of compressed air for transportation becomes obvious:
Medium Megajoules/liter
Compressed air (300 bar) 0.2
LNG 22.2
Gasoline 34.2
Diesel Oil 37.3
Even if you raised the pressure to 3000 bar (>44,000 psi — no way I’m going anywhere near a tank with that kind of pressure — that’s the breach pressure of a modern handgun), you are still less than 10% of the energy storage of LNG, and less than 6% the energy storage of Diesel.
The only way this will achieve any significant use is if government mandates it. It’s much too inefficient to succeed otherwise.
Please don’t tell Al Gore.
@ShrNfr says:
January 31, 2012 at 7:28 am
“Somebody is in bad need of a course in thermodynamics. Even with a compressed air engine, you have thermodynamic loss. Of course it is hidden from you. The waste heat in the cycle is the heat that you get rid of when you compress the gas.”
It seems to me no one above has looked into how these compressed air car motors work. I have not seen the insides of that motor shown above but if it is built on the same principle that the French one is, a great deal of what is written above needs an overhaul.
First the French motor. It does not work by expanding air into a cylinder the way a jack hammer works. Crummy air motors like that are about 3% efficient and if you multiply the expansions to 4 cylinders perhaps another 3% is available – no further comment because I have not looked at that – it leads nowhere efficient.
The motor works by using a tiny shot of very cold air to cool the ambient air already in a cylinder. Obviously expanding the highly compressed air cools it. It works on ‘coolth’ and ‘suction’. Stick that in your ‘lost heat, cold air, bad thermodynamics, hidden energy loss, no cruising range’ pipes and smoke it. The motor was developed by an F1 mechanic who was already involved in using this technique to extract more power from an F1 engine (which is allowed because it is not using fuel or increasing the displacement of the engine.)
So get rid of the idea that the only way to use compressed air it to expand it into a closed space. It is far cleverer to pull on a large piston than to push on a series of small => large ones. I can’t know that is what Tata is doing until I see the insides, but the technology is around.
Second, the compresion of air (normally only about 45% efficient) can be done in certain places using Taylor Hydraulic Compressors (trompes) that run on water. There is a famous on in Ontaio at Ragged Chute http://www.piclist.com/techref/other/pump/raggedchute.htm and another well studied one in Chicago. The link there says 1910 but I think there was one there in 1888. No matter. It ran for the better part of a century being shut off only a couple of times for cleaning. The air bubbles introduced are tiny – looking like white milk while being compressed.
The street cars of Paris and Chicago used to run on compressed air supplied by pipelines from outside the city. The development of the ‘trompe’ was very advanced by the mid-30’s. It was used until the Chicago city father were bribed to switch them over to electricity from which money could be continuously made generating it. There is not much money to be garnered from a compression technology that uses no fuel. It is thought the Catalan monks used the system to make iron, keeping the technology secret for centuries.
It is possible the technology combined with bubble pumps could have raised water in the hanging gardens of Babylon using only the bricks and mortar available. At a low lift it can be made in a primitive fashion and works indefinitely as long as there is lots of water falling in a river nearby. This compression (entrained air in a descending water column) happens naturally in the Alps and gives rise to ‘carbonated water’ emerging from springs that disappear into the rock some distance above.
Well done Tata.
Um, I think I’ll stick with my gasoline powered car, thanks.
Its cheap, reliable, doesn’t explode like a bomb, I can refuel it anywhere, it can pull a trailer, it keeps me warm in the winter and cool in the summer, it has a 500km range, it pulls equally hard with a full or empty tank, it’s blue, it does not make me look like a climate alarmist, its large… shall I go on?
Did I mention that it’s large?
Yup, I’ll stick with my gas car thanks.
Mike Abbott.
Who knows exactly what is going on here? The Tata bears an uncanny resemblance to the MDI projects. As I understood it the Tata licence was for India only, with MDI retaining the rest of the world.
If they can get it working I think it will be great to see. Here in France we have a lot of ‘yoghurt pot’ cars, small 500CC single cylinder diesels, restricted to 70kph. The air car would be a much better alternative, and probably no more noisy to boot.
There is a firm in Australia making air vehicles, mostly small utility trucks I recall, using a rotary air motor. I’d like to see the two technologies put together.
I recall that the key touted advantage was the lack of exhaust emmissions, and the main drawbacks the 5000psi bomb (air tank) and the excessive noise. Range could be extended by burning some fuel to heat the air before it went through the double expansion engine, which had some heat transfer arrangements – can’t recall what that was for.
However, compressed air can be stored so the nearly useless windmills and solar PV might be used to charge up tanks for use later.
Remember that the rare earths (for motors) and even Lithium for electric cars may become very expensive/short supply. A compressed air car can be made of fairly ordinary stuff?
May be only a niche product to start with, but who knows? And if India develops Thorium power plants, they may have cheap ‘lec – unlike the UK, which may have hardly any if the current lot carry on as they are doing! (bit colder at present and CCGT is giving 28%, coal 48%, nuclear 17% and wind 3%, evrything else including interconnectors to France etc, the balance (rounded figures). Coal due to be shut by EU regulation, nuclear ageing, gas from unstable regimes, wind useless …)
Ed Caryl says: “How many pressurizations cycles before the tanks blow?.”
More than the cycles for a hybrid or all-electric car battery.
To compress air enough to produce the stated performance, you wouldn’t have to decompress the air, because you could use the nuclear fusion reaction occurring in the air tank for motive energy.
Motor Development International have been developing, testing and trying to sell compressed air vehicles for 20 years, the vehicles have performance limitations of about 60kmh (36mph) cruising speed and a range of 200km (120 miles). So about the same speed and four times the range of current battery hybrids on battery alone.
Guy Nègre, who is the driving force behind the company, is a former Formula 1 race engineer.
They licensed their technology to Tata in 2009 and cars were displayed at the at the 2008 New York Car Show.
There’s nothing new here, move along now
Here is a not-too-favorable article on the French design in the engineering press:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/environment/deflating-the-air-car/1
The big problem that no one has solved (and there may not be any good solution) is the heating on compression (which is virtually certain to be an almost 100% energy loss in any system cheap enough for the mass market) and the cooling on expansion when driving the car. Nobody has figured out how to keep the frost generated by the resulting subzero air from gumming up the works completely. If Tata is keeping the exhausted air at greater than -15C, it means that they are not using the compressed air at a high enough pressure to have any worthwhile storage density. And even so, it may not eliminate the frost problem.
The Oerlikon Gyrobus. Recharge every 1/2 mile.
Sounds like the Bob Newhart reporting on the Wright Bros. Coast to Coast Airline limitation of having to land every 150 feet.
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In the early 1950’s, the well known Swiss engineering company Oerlikon introduced the “Gyrobus,” a bus for 35 passengers that ran on electric power generated by a spinning flywheel, which was itself brought up to speed at points ½ mile apart by tapping the electric power net. The Gyrobuses were introduced in 1953 and remained in service (some of them in the Belgian Congo) for 10 years.
They were pushed out by diesel buses, which were not limited to a route with electrical tap points, nor forced to wait 1 to 2 minutes at each such point to recharge. Fuel cost was not a consideration at the time.
But diesel buses use more expensive fuel less efficiently and with more pollution than the corresponding amount of electric power, and so the flywheel bus may make a comeback¾with a flywheel that can store more energy per unit volume than two decades ago, and controlled by semiconductor devices, themselves run by microprocessors.
A four-year, $5 million contract for developing a flywheel bus was awarded to General Electric last year(?) jointly by the Departments of Energy and Transportation
Even more of a pipe dream. You’re describing the Sterling cycle (atmospheric) engine. The original steam engines worked this way to pump water out of coal mines. Instead of the expansion side of steam they used the condensation cycle. It’s a common science demonstration to put steam from a tea kettle into a container with a tight screw top. Displace all the air with steam vapor and then screw the top on and as the steam cools and condenses, the container will be crushed by ambient atmospheric pressure. Atmospheric engines “suck” the piston up in the cylinder instead of pushing it down.
It was James Watt’s magnificent contribution to the Industrial Age to realize that there was much more energy (and therefore efficiency) in the expansion cycle of steam rather than the condensation cycle. In fact the overall efficiency goes up directly with pressure. Once high-pressure steam engines were developed, the older atmospheric engines were obsolete.
The absolute maximum amount of energy you can develop in an atmospheric engine is the ambient atmospheric pressure (1 bar). This assumes you can create a total vacuum in the cylinder. Whereas if you use the expansion power of pressurized gas, you can create many times 1 bar per surface area. Atmospheric engines require large cylinders because of their low pressure, and therefore tend to have a very low power-to-weight ratio.
My father-in-law has an old Sterling cycle engine he cranks up occasionally to amuse the grandchildren. It was used by the railroads to pump groundwater back into water towers after a steam locomotive filled its boiler tanks. The reason was that regulations required a licensed engineer to be present when high pressure steam was in use, but the Sterling cycle pump could be left to run unattended. They would fill the firebox with wood, light the fire, and leave it pumping until the fuel burned out. It probably weighs 500 pounds and develops maybe 2 horsepower. Except for this niche use (created by legal restrictions) atmospheric engines were obsolete more than 150 years ago.
I remember a manufacturing plant near where I worked that used an ancient (switcher) steam-locomotive that ran on compressed air instead of steam. Apparently they just pumped the boiler up in the morning & several times during the day & it could serve their modest rail-car switching duties.
Dunno about a balloon – but at the pressures this ‘lil guy stores this is more likely ar maybe this
How to tax? That’s really simple – just look what we Europeans are going to do: a GPS logger with 3G data connection to every car and the government can tax you according to where, when, and how much you drive. And of course they are not tracking individuals… really not – don’t you believe in the overwhelming benevolence of your government?
BTW that is not a joke. Such systems are proposed in many EU countries.
Like all the “Electrics”, this is also a car that’s powered by coal.
You doubt me?
Then where did the electricity that’s used to compress the air come from?
An even greater example of compressed air is the “air rifle” Lewis and Clarke took with them on their journey of discovery. It could be pumped up to 800 psi and would fire about 30 rounds on one charge. It is credited with getting them safely through Indian territory because the Indians were so completely impressed with a rifle that didn’t make the normal explosive sound that they didn’t bother them.
I understand they’ll be offering a Deluxe model with a rubber band for range extension or extra power when passing golf carts on two-lane roads.
Rumor has it that the Super Deluxe model will come with an emergency bicycle pump in case you’re ever stranded far from a source of compressed air.
Re Beng’s engine,
I think they used high pressure steam from a ‘communal boiler’. The ones I saw had heavily lagged ‘steam’ ‘boilers’ to reduce heat loss. So essentially they were passive compressed steam locos. But his may have been different.
It was not all that long ago since I remember it, much mining equipment was pneumatic and many of the mine locomotives (in the days of mine cars on tracks) were compressed air operated. What’s new is old or maybe what’s old is new again.
*Sigh*. 2012, and a crate powered by compressed air.
Where’s my fusion-powered hovercar? And my personal jet pack? And my family-friendly interplanetary runaround?
Who hijacked the future? This whole planet is going in the wrong direction….
This could be just the thing to make solar and wind power viable. When they are producing unneeded energy it could be compressing air for transportation.