Posted by David Sherman on Monday, June 18, 2001 at 11:48PM :
In Reply to: Somehow I don't think this will work with PW or M37 posted by Brian in Oregon on Monday, June 18, 2001 at 12:14PM :
Every few years the media does a big story on the fellow who just invented a car that runs on compressed air and another on the one that just invented tires run-flat tires. The cars of course "don't pollute". The tires are always urethane foam. Somehow neither one catches on. I don't know what's so bad about the tires, but compressed-air powered vehicles have been around for 100 years in the form of little locomotives for pulling mine cars around underground. The advantage is that there is no sparks to cause explosions and no exhaust to poison the miners. But compressed-air powered vehicles have one unavoidable thermodynamic failing: When you compress air, it gets hot. By the time you get around to using it, it's cooled off. In the meantime all that heat was wasted. Wasted heat equals wasted electricity in the compressor equals more pollution in the power station. The flip side of that is it takes some doing to keep the motor exhaust from icing up in damp weather. Nothing revolutionary here. Just a new implementation of an idea that was inefficient and uneconomical years ago and still is.
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