Air cars/engines again

 


A Korean company has made a compressed air/electric hybrid:
http://www.autoland.am/all.php?cat=technology

 



     http://www.autoland.am/show_category.php?cat=technology&idd3
     On the face of things, the combination of air/electric makes no sense.  Why
have two different accumulators in a car?  If the goal is to reover the braking
energy, you already have a perfectly good battery onboard and a perfectly good
motor that presumably could double as a generator.  Why add the complexity,
cost, & weight of the air system?

     It seems to me that the car will still have a limited range, but the
article gives no clue as the to relative capacities of the air tank and the
batteries or the relative HP of the air motor and electric motor.  It would be
interesting to see what the design goals of the car are, and how air/electric is
superior to just electric.

     I can't really analyze what they are trying to acomplish based on the
article.  I am sure that the designers are not dumb, so it would be nice to know
what they are thinking.  Until then, I see little point in endlessly guessing.

Vaughn

 

Vaughn wrote:

Why

braking

The only reason I could think they might use different technology
for regenerative braking is that electric batteries have limits on
how fast they can charge and discharge. The faster you try to charge
them, the less of the energy they can store. Using a different type
of storage that can accept energy faster might be more efficient.
Most designers have been looking at ultracapacitors for this role
but compressed air might be cheaper, if they can get it to work.

Anthony

 



braking

perfectly good

complexity,

Toshiba claim to have a battery that can do just that.


Apparently it works, and they have been at it for around 3 to 4 years.

Air is free and is know to work, and has been used to propel vehicles for
over 100 years.  UCLA and Ford have been working on an IC engine with
compressed air, all in the same engine and switches from one to the other
seamlessly. The French air engine could do the same, and only from air, but
they designed the engine from scratch, while UCLA use a stock V6 with
camless valves.

Air is the perfect accumulator for a hybrid.   A few hybrid projects are
about mating different types of units together: Stirling/air,
Stirling/electric, etc.  Stirling/air looks the way to me.

The Koreans are using a Chevrolet Matiz car.
http://www.chevrolet.co.uk

 



Free? I can run my car on just air?


 and is know to work, and has been used to propel vehicles for