[knightrider_7]

A group of Egyptian students has designed a vehicle which can run on air, as a part of their graduation project from Helwan University, Cairo.

The students say their vehicle can hit 40 kilometres an hour and last 30 kilometres before needing to be refuelled, and it only costs about 18,000 Egyptian pounds ($1,008.40) to build.

"The operational cost of the vehicle... will be almost nothing. You are basically using compressed air. You are not paying for fuel and also you do not need cooling," said Mahmoud Yasser, a student who helped design it.

Source

[Rahul Bhalgat]

This technology uses compressed air at much higher pressure (up to 300 bar or so).

The compressors need electricity to run and that needs fuel to be burnt at the power plant.

Look for the "Compressed air car" on Wiki and it says:

The overall efficiency of the compressed air 'engine' is just 7% against 14% for the IC engine.

The cars running on Lithium Ion batteries outperform those running on the compressed air or fuel cell by a significant margin.

So compressed air cars don't look like coming for the consumers.

[Ironhide]

Tata Motors has been working on the same for many years IIRC. The technology shows promise, but in the end, the challenge will be to make it commercially viable. Of course, it remains to be seen how green is it in the end?





Here is Wikipedia article that elaborates on the subject of Compressed air car. Here's one from Howstuffworks.

Autocar professional reported last year that Tata Motors' air-powered car project may be ready to launch ready in 3 years' time.

Here's a video on the subject.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRpxhlX4Ga0

Articles Courtesy : Respective owners
Picture courtesy : By Deepak Gupta - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3790791
Video Courtesy : Creator/ Youtube

Cheers !

[alpha1]

The title is quite misleading.
Compressed air and plain "air" is very different from each other.

As others have pointed out, compression of air requires power and also huge storage tank. Finally the compression-expansion cycle is an open one in this case, and quite inefficient.

[Samurai]

I clicked on the thread thinking about entropy of air... only to realize it is based on the ancient compressed air technology.

Anyway, I have renamed the thread accordingly.