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.
Justa Joe says:
‘Nobody is going to give up their features in favor of this golf cart, sorry.”
I think you are forgetting the target market for this car is Indians..in India! The vast majority of which have no features to give up. So I believe this will be an ideal car for it’s intended markets…India, Africa and probably China (assuming the Chinese simply don’t pirate the design).
Clearly Western design and safety regs will make this car a non-starter in the US, Europe, japan Australia etc. due to the added weight of the legislated crash protections, but for developing and 3rd world markets..yep, as long as it can achieve performance close to what’s being advertised, then it will be a winner.
Public transportation in buses moved by compressed-air already existed aprox. 100 years back in time.
hey TATA you missed the boat surely ????
Haven’t had time to read all of the comments but:
Originally, and this may have changed, the TATA air engine (developed I believe by a Frenchman)included a petrol-fuelled heater to heat the compressed air before entry into the motor to increase power and range.
In Australia , Angelo di Pietro, has had compressed air delivery trucks running in markets using the compressed air motor he developed using the wankel principle. He, himself, is an ex Daimler-Benz development engineer who spent most of his time working on development of the wankel rotary engine principle. He also has cars he owns running on compressed air using his motor and has a range of other applications including outboard motors – I got a colleague to go and meet him and see the motors in use. Impressive. The chinese, by the way, have tried very hard to obtain one of his engines.
I don’t consider it a pointless technology as so many commentators seem to above, it may not have mass-market application (unless TATA prove that wrong) but it does have a number of niche market possibilities and can be provided as a renewable resource. Compressed air storage is cheap, effective and non-polluting – unlike batteries. A two stage compressor can be powered by water power, wind power or by electric motor/alternator run from water, wind or solar enabling energy in the form of compressed air to be stored for times when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine – without the need for batteries. So in remote areas compressed air can come from solar power during daylight hours and at night by running it back through the electric motor/alternator used to run the compressor can produce electricity as and when required. With a little imagination and some lateral thinking there are a wide range of applications which could be powered from genuinely renewable energy – in the right geographic areas and avoiding the need for expensive infrastructure. As one example there are plenty of agricultural applications across the world requiring low power output which have the potential to be powered by compressed air produced through renewable energy sources on farm.
Sorry to those of you who think it of little value but I think you are wrong and haven’t given it enough thought.
GREAT ARTICLE MR. LAWSON, PLEASE DO A FOLLOW-UP. GREAT JOB, THANK YOU.
I think the Pachaurimobile will be eclipsed by this, the enviro contingent’s dream car.
L. says:
January 31, 2012 at 3:27 pm
I think you are forgetting the target market for this car is Indians..in India!
———————————–
You’re correct. It beats walking, riding a bike, or packing into a crowded city bus if you’re living a 3rd world existence. I was responding more to a commenter who was comparing this vehicle to our conventional cars, which are vastly superior in terms of utility, performance, and safety.
It seems the simplest solution is to use liquid air. One store comparatively enormous amount energy, and you only use high pressure tank to for energy needed in near term. Inject liquid air [or nitrogen] into high pressure tank, and ambient temperature will increase pressure. So to get extend range in a hurry, you increase amount heat you get from ambient air. If you not using car, for long time, remove reservoir, or allow to vent. So have high pressure tank that can get you say 10 or 20 miles, and liquid air extends it to say couple hundred miles. And so fill up similar to gasoline car.
I used to design compressed natural gas (CNG) fueling stations, so I know a fair bit about putting compressed gas into a car. It is fraught with problems! It is very difficult to quickly fill the tanks; if you fast-fill, the heat of compression heats the gas already in the tank so much that the expansion from the heat creates a spike in pressure, terminating a pressure based fill. You can ignore the pressure spike, and fill by mass flow, but then technically you are over-pressuring the cylinders. Filling by mass flow requires an initial pressure reading, a partial fill, a bit of settling time, after which the computer estimates the volume of the tank being filled using good ol’ PV=nRT, then the tank is topped off by mass flow based on the volume calculation. Too many assumptions in my honest opinion, too many places for something to go wrong.
Another problem is the pressure cycling of the tanks. All engineers know that pressurizing and depressurizing tanks (or aircraft) causes stress cracks. I occasionally would happen upon CNG station fill storage banks made up of DOT bottles (essentially the same steel bottles welding oxygen or nitrogen come in) which had been overfilled by equipment malfunction or grievous operator error. As I would bleed off the gas to prevent the tanks from popping like balloons, I would hear the DOT bottles making “tink” sounds as the stress cracks would try to close.
Various schemes have been contrived to pressure test the tanks, either by removing them from the car and hydro-statically testing them, or attaching sensors to “listen” for the “tink” sound of the cracks, but these tests are expensive. Another strategy was to simply replace the tanks after a certain time period or number of pressurization cycles, an extremely expensive option, more expensive probably than what you ever saved on the price of fuel.
If there is an equipment malfunction or operator error in the fill, the result can be catastrophic. An apparent overfill of the CNG tanks in a small pickup at a utility in Indiana on Dec.14, 2000 utterly destroyed the truck, and a tank landed half a block away, going through the roof of a bowling alley and landing in the bar. This wasn’t a fiery natural gas explosion, it was simply the tank popping like a balloon from over pressurization, and the truck was destroyed; the pickup bed was gone, the truck nearly sheared in half, the back of the cab blown away and the roof blown off. Even the doors were accordioned, the seat and dash destroyed. Fortunately the driver had left the vehicle before the explosion.
Well, they charge .75 to 1.00 to use the compressed air to fill up your tires, so I could see them charging a bit for it.
You first!
Seven or eight years ago I remember reading about another proposed air compression/expansion engine — I think this one was in Seattle, that promised 60 mph and a range of fifty miles or so. I was a bit skeptical and did some actually thermodynamic calculations, and the best I could come up with given the size of the car was maybe a range of 15 miles with a widely efficient engine.
I learned later that the best range the company actually got was seven or eight miles.
But who knows. . . . .those chaps in India are pretty smart, and maybe they’ve figured out a way to get around some of those pesky thermodynamic laws. . . . . .
Please.
Every time this air car story rises like a Phoenix from the septic tank, it brings out the ” even though we lose money on every transaction, we’ll make up the difference in volume” crowd.
The Air Car scam seems to get publicity after every car show. The Air Pod scam has been going on for at least the last 10 years with Negre always claiming that the care will be hitting the streets “Next year”. The only independent test resulted in something like a 10km range while going 20kmh. It’s just like the cold fusion reactor scam a few weeks back. I’m actually a bit surprised WUWT readers fall for this type of stuff.
Don’t believe the hype. Look at INDEPENDENT testing by RELIABLE third party sources.
I agree with Ben Hern’s comment: “guys, a litle perspective before leaping to find fault in the latest innovative thinking”.
Scepticism is good, scepticism is honourable. But cynicism is something else, cynicism is unworthy of this great blog.
If the energy density problem and the safety problem can be resolved, this vehicle might well fill a useful niche in the market: short urban journeys in polluted 3rd world cities. Good luck to ’em, I say.
Would the filling stations have a huge high pressurized tank to fill these or would they use industrial air compressors? If they use compressors, then the air being pumped in with contain added heat from compression, which will slowly be lost through the tank, ensuring that you can never really fill it 100%. If they use air from a large compressed tank, then the loss of heat from the expansion into your Air tank would mean that over a short period of time, the air would heat from the ambient temperature and increase the pressure (depending on how far from the safety thresholds these normally run, that could be an entirely benign issue, or a possible road bomb). Speaking which, has anyone looked into exactly how much localized damage these things could cause if INTENTIONALLY detonated? It would be the most innocuous looking car bomb ever.
That being said, there’s a lot of people who don’t really seem to understand the heating and cooling of compressing or expanding gases. You won’t freeze the atmosphere by slowly pumping out super cold air as you drive along, because the heat energy you let off from initially compressing the gas and then allowing it to reach thermal equilibrium with the ambient air would be equivalent to the heat needed to warm the exhaust back up.
Long story short though, Laws of Thermodynamics are still ensuring that you can’t make something out of nothing, but also that you can’t destroy anything, only change it… There’s no way for us to destroy all of our heat energy by repeatedly compressing and releasing air, or all the A/Cs and air compressors in the world would have already offset all of the modern age warming and we’d all be skiing to work right now (before we died of starvation).
Realistically, is there any heater in this golf cart? Because the A/C is supposed to be a byproduct, but the car isn’t producing any usable heat energy. (BTW, they aren’t pumping air directly from the tank to cool you, they’re redirecting the “exhaust”… interesting aside here, there’s vegetable oil used to lubricate the pistons, and the air you’ll be using for A/C is going through there before it comes to you… will all your A/C air smell like the oil that you’re using? How long before McDonald’s brand oil is available, to give your car that Classic French Fry smell?)
Finally, I am not an automobile engineer, but is a 4-cyl engine REALLY the best they could come up with for this? I’m going to go way out on a limb here and assume that issues like recycling the fuel/air exhaust to ensure complete burning of hydrocarbons, the ENTIRE compression phase, and proper air/fuel mixing are not an issue here at all… it’s purely mechanical energy, released directly from the tank (most likely) to the pistons. I might be talking out of my ass here, but I’m pretty sure a more efficient engine design is entirely possible. For every PSI over the surrounding atmosphere that your exhaust comes out, you’ve wasted that energy. I’m really starting to think that the people designing this vehicle just took a regular car engine and said “How can we make this run on air?”
The picture of the engine shows the cam belt on inside out. The teeth should be on the inside to match the teeth on the pulley wheels. It would not work as shown due to belt slippage.
Compressed air has a lot of stored energy. A serious accident and those two compressed air cylinders will explode like an RPG7.
“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.”
Not sure you will be able to sleep while your compressor is on.
Can I get a liquid N2 powered version? Keep the distribution folks happy…
I’ve got an idea..
Wind is free – right..?
Why not build loads of windmills – all driving electric generators – which all feed the electric grid – exactly like the windmills of old, which look so cute in Dutch landscape paintings..
What’s that you say – they went out of fashion in a big hurry when steam and other more reliable methods of grinding corn and draining farmland came in..?
Oh, well – it was just a thought…
I am as doubtful about this as the next guy here.
I would point out to the people who think that as the tank runs low the pressure will drop that:
They will not be running the car on the unregulated pressure from the tank. The tank is overpressurized. Based on what I am seeing, there will be more than one pressure stage – it would not be smart to take 3400psi air and only use it once. From what I see in Wikipedia’s footnotes, this is
a.) not new technology, other than maybe the electronics, and
b.) certainly well enough engineered.
I would caution doubters that this is not CRU nor Michael Mann. This is all just engineering, not cutting edge theoretical science. In other words, it isn’t exactly rocket science.
These types of engines used to be called “Steam-engines” in my day.
Oh, also, I thought these bits are pertinent (from Wiki):
@Alan Watt
“Even more of a pipe dream. You’re describing the Sterling cycle (atmospheric) engine.”
A Stirling engine is a heat engine, not a compressed air engine though there is gas compression involved. A thermoacoustic refrigerator is also a type of Stirling engine, whether travelling wave or standing wave. The French car uses a compressed air motor, not a Stirling engine.
“The original steam engines worked this way to pump water out of coal mines.”
No, that was the condensation of steam in a closed chamber which is not a Stirling engine either. Watt sprayed water into the chamber to help cool and condense steam faster after the first model worked.
The release of heat during condensation is a serious impediment to efficient operation. The compressed air motor of course does not condense the air.
“Atmospheric engines “suck” the piston up in the cylinder instead of pushing it down.”
Yes. That is how the French engine works. There is more than one way to produce suction.
It was mentioned by a couple of people that there is a ‘heater’ of some sort on some air motors. It is my understanding that the French design does not heat the compressed air. The flame is used to heat the ambient air that is drawn into the cylinder reducing the mass of air contained at standard pressure at whatever the volumetric efficiency is. This assists the contraction caused by the cooling of the injected compressed air. Such a motor necessarily runs at a fairly low speed.
The energy lost during compression is in a way, regained by starting of with hot air on the intake and expelling cold air from the exhaust. As there is a temperature drop, there is energy available. The clever part of the French motor is that it takes advantage of the low temperature decompressed air to extract energy from air at the ambient temp. It is nothing at all like the ‘air motors’ one has in shop tools which work on expansion of compressed gas (air).