Voila! A Car Powered By Air

(CBS)  With prices like these, maybe it's time to put some hard thought into what we could be filling up with. The Iranians say they have a solar-powered car. Engineers in the U.S. and Europe say they have tried hydrogen. But, how about air? CBS News correspondent Sheila MacVicar reports.

At their factory in southern France, father-and-son team Guy and Cyril Negre insist air power is no joke.

"It's a different way of thinking cars," says Cyril.

Plain old air compressed in the tank, they say, cheap and non-polluting. Sound too good to be true?

"This is not a toy car," says Cyril. "It's a real car. The other thing is it's a very zero emission car. You won't pollute, there won't be emission and the thing also, you have a very economical car."

A car, says the Negres, that will cost just $2 for every 120 miles.

The Negres have a long love affair with cars. Guy designed a Formula One race car engine. Cyril worked at Bugati. The technology for their car, they say, is relatively simple and safe.

"When you compress the air in the tank, inside of the tank, this is like compressing a spring, and then the tank gives you back the energy of the air when it expands," says Cyril.

Compressed air in a carbon-fiber tank, something like scuba divers use, drives the pistons and turns the crankshaft. There is no combustion and no gasoline. That's why there's no pollution. You fill it up at an air compressor. It may sound far-fetched, but at his labs on the campus of UCLA, professor Su-Chin Chow is also exploring the power of air.

"The beauty of this concept is air is everywhere and it doesn't generate pollutions. The main problem is the technology to make use of air," he says.

Trying out the car, MacVicar says "It's a bit like driving a lawn mower."

The Negres say after years of delays, even skullduggery, they have solved their technical problems.

"You know, it feels pretty solid," says MacVicar. "It sounds like a lawn mower but it actually feels pretty solid."

Another year, they say, and they'll be ready for large scale production, with a top speed of 55 miles-an-hour, floating on air.

[joisme]

Shame on CBS news for lending it's credibility to nonsense like this. The "air car" has been around for a long time in many forms and it's always a hoax.

Two basic systems exist for powering a vehicle. The first and most popular is to burn fuel in an onboard engine. The second is to store energy in some other form and use it to power the vehicle. The downfall of the latter case has always been that the energy density of fossil fuel always wins out. Nothing, not batteries , not flywheels ,not fuel cells , not molten salt (honest it's been considered) and certainly not compressed air even comes close to gasoline or diesel fuel as a medium of transportable energy.
All the true believers and conspiracy theorist that posted comments need to educate themselves and CBS needs to fire somebody.

[dennisko1]

I do agree the previous comment about needing a source of energy to produce compress air. However, it's much cheaper anyway to have the electrical energy to convert to compress air, eg currently free of charge when you fill up your tires with compressed air and available at each station.

If a deviced is being designed to integrate or installed with the current compressed outlet in all these stations, we solve the problem of distribution like hydrogen or LPG gas.

Then, instantly Air-car can find compressed air filling station as easy as gasoline! That's perfect pictures everyone wants to see!

Then, all matters is the electrical supply to the filling device. At least, one source of pollution (from cars exhaust) can be deleted!!

DK

[cacee13601]

whats next a car that runs on water??

[newsthought1]

It is misleading to think that this is a non-polluting car. Energy is needed to compress the air. If you can get that energy from a solar panel or wind generator, you might have something. But chances are that the energy will come from a conventional power plant, which does pollute somewhat. People have posted fears about the air tank exploding or leaking, but gasoline tanks are not pretty either when they leak or burn, perhaps much worse. I'm not convinced yet that air is better than hydrogen or an electric battery for storing and using energy, but if it can move some people off of oil at a reasonable price, go for it. Another worry is that such a light car (and passengers) would not fare well vs. an SUV in a collision, but this is more of a problem in the U.S. than in some foreign cities full of little eurocars. Now if we could just all agree to give up our SUVs at the same time... (yeah, sure...)

[larryr5]

Compressing air and then expanding it in an engine isn't a very efficient use of energy. Look up "carnot cycle". Wikipedia has a nice description. I'm not sure how it would compare to using batteries. At least with batteries and motor/generator systems you can recover some of the power when braking. Anyway, when you change energy from one form to another (in this case fossil fuel to electricity to compressed air to work)you lose some energy at each step of the process. With a huge investment in infrastructure, we could skip some of the conversion processes and have electric power rails installed in the roads. Then cars would only need an electric engine and a power meter (very light weight, therefore lower energy consumption). Might be feasible in urban areas. And with all the sparks the pickups would cause, we might be able to produce enough ozone to fix that hole in the atmosphere. :-)

[siddin-2009]

Me? I prefer hydrogen. Its relatively simple, you can either use water and add salt or use saltwater straight out of the ocean. Either way you then add a catalyst that costs about $0.50, put it into the tank and voila, you now have water being split into pure oxygen and hydrogen.

[slabslab99]

I sincerely wish these French developers good luck. But, for all of you that think this is such a good idea and that anyone who brings up practical problems based on knowledge and experience - I have just one question for you.
Where the hell were you for the past several decades while AMERICAN entrepreneurs and small companies spent tons of money and time in garages and basements to develop and test the compressed air idea, flywheels, countless electric car ideas, fluid power hybrids and so many other ideas? They worked hard and smart, and I guarantee you they weren't web droids that disliked engineering. They took enormous chances, and continue to do so. Where were you?
You read about this stuff on CBSNEWS and just start attacking engineers - that scares me more than anything, that YOU might be lurking as America's big problem.

[slabslab99]

BTW - just because a tank is no-shat doesn't mean it isn't dangerous. It only means it isn't expected to produce shrapnel. A burst high pressure tank will still blow the roof of a house off and they have. You have to overdesign, taking into consideration the heat these tanks can be exposed to, sudden shocks such as in a collision, too paid filling, etc.
These French guys don't have some magic cf tanks. They're the same ones you can buy now. They're just not cheap. Even though they are already being produced in good quantities for the aerospace industry. NONE of this changes the dynamics of the propulsion system.

[slabslab99]

BTW - the fact that the exhaust air is cool demonstrates the adiabatic nature of this expansion. You don't want adiabatic expansion. That is a big source of inefficiency because it represents wasted energy that can be used for propulsion. It is energy that was used to compress the air. That's why the bigger system is better, in fact, it has to be quite large or a lot of energy will be wasted.
When the air is compressed it gets hot, so the tanks cannot be filled rapidly unless they deliberately over pressurize and stress the vessels. When the gas expands it cools. Switching back and forth between numerous smaller vessels would help, but this adds to the cost and complexity.
Crack a high pressure tank wide open and let the valve just dump the charge as fast as it can. It will be covered in frost. It is a virtual refrigeration cycle and something that the French developers still have to overcome.

[slabslab99]

Not sure it's even possible to have an intelligent discussion of this car idea. Many are looking carefully at it from all directions - the good and the bad, only to be called names and be charged with standing in the way of progress. Good grief. I can list a dozen ideas which newpapers took and ran with. Uneducated people got excited about them, but the ideas were full of holes. They simply faded away. I guess all those were really good ideas but bad engineers killed them. How many people still believe there was a 100mpg carburator, or that magnets on your gasline could increase mileage, but couldn't be told otherwise. These guys in France can be admired, and again the car does work. But I'm not impressed by cavemen that read soemthing on a website then start screaming vulgar names at others, then expect to be treated like they know what they're talking about. Is that what makes the US great? Apparently.