The Air Car.
After single-handedly taking a decision to increase pollution in our part of the world by 100% by inflicting the Nano, Tata Motors is finally doing something worthwhile. A recent visit by my wife to Bangalore got me a sneak preview of the miniCAT.
I had heard, previously, about compressed air technology, but not about MDI and about miniCAT. Our in-the-know friend informed us that the concept car seen would be in commercial production by the end of this year, although being more sensible than in the past, Tata are not telling us where its going to be made.
Although the original concept of the MiniCAT is European and has been hawking the idea to various automakers since 1991, the Tata development may be the kick-starter for this technology - the Tatas are known to be fairly conservative and canny in their approach to automotive innovation.
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References -
Tesla Motors opens their second store.
This one is here in the Bay Area.
There had been some skeptical buzz several months ago about whether they'd actually ever start selling these in earnest. It looks to me like they are.
--Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit. - W. Somerset Maugham
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)But really, really expensive - seventies IIRC.
--In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
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| parent )a real neck-snapper.
When I nosed around Tesla's site, I discovered that the price is now $109,000.00, with a 12-month waiting list ($5,000.00 will get you on it).
What color do you want?
--Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit. - W. Somerset Maugham
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| parent )http://www.teslamotors.com/design/gallery-body.php
0-60 in 3.9 - so Harley's getting one, then?
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| parent )109K? Sheesh. There could be four guys on the list and only two cars, at that tariff.
--In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
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| parent ):)
--GW Bush, leading contender for worst President ever.
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| parent )The standard way of modeling an internal combustion engine to study its efficiency is as an air pump. But here you have two: the compressor that charges the tanks as well as the engine that drives the car. So two inefficient steps. Also, you have an engine that varies in power as the tank empties; it'll have some kind of regulator, of course, but the efficiency (ie losses during conversion of potential energy of the compressed air into kinetic energy at the crankshaft) of a pump like this goes up with cylinder pressure. (IRRC an IC engine typically has around 50-70 bar pressure at the beginning of the power stroke just as the air-fuel mixture has burned.) And of course the compressed air is just the medium for transferring electrical energy from a powerplant to kinetic energy in a car, so doesn't this simply move the source of the carbon emission from the car to the powerplant, with added inefficiencies in the process?
--In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
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)you're assuming a big energy loss at the compressor stage but that does not have to be the case. The heat from the compression of the air and mechanical friction in the compressor could be used for other purposes. (I'm not saying that is what's being done -- just that it could be done). In an automobile there is very little that one can do to utilize the waste heat but in a large fixed installation you have a lot of other options.
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| parent )The article indicates that, treating it as the conceptual equivalent of regenerative braking in an electric car. And the photo of the engine shows heat-dissipating fins on the side of the cylinder portion of the block.
True, you could use something like co-gen on industrial-sized compressors, but you'll always be converting a significant amount of the kinetic energy used to turn the compressors into heat of compression, plus geartrain losses etc. The point just being that the mechanical and thermal losses occur twice before motive power is applied to the wheels of the car.
--In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
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| parent )where better controls can be enforced is probably better in our situation.
One of the problems here is the use of petrol adulterated with kerosene and naphtha - cheaper because of Government subsidies for the latter, than petrol on its own, but quite horrifyingly emission-inducing.
Your point about decreasing levels of efficiency the farther you move down the energy ladder is correct, of course.
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| parent )That's terrible. Unburned naphtha (benzene) is really bad to breathe in vapor form and has been banned here as a solvent for probably thirty uears, but I didn't know the particulates were so poisonous. The use of kerosene is puzzling, since it's also a petroleum distillate, and is more expensive than gas here, at least when refined to Jet-A levels. It's so slow-buring that it only combusts well when preheated in turbines, but can be clean-burning in that use It actually has significantly more energy per unit volume than gas. Are there refineries pumping this stuff out instead of taking the feedstock to gasoline refinement levels, or are they making it from low-quality oil or oil tars? Maybe those engines are two-stroke?
--In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
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| parent )The city does have 12 million people (that's about the population of Sweden, I believe). And yes, the engines are 2-stroke.
Kerosene is heavily subsidised (its the poor man's cooking and lighting fuel).
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| parent )especially if not completely oxidized. The byproducts of it's incomplete combustion are almost all cancer causing. Because of the sharing of electrons in the benzene ring, you get a very strong bond (hard to completely oxidize) and at the same time it's very reactive in the conditions that you find in a internal combustion cylinder, so you get huge numbers of byproducts. It would actually be quite difficult to design a system that would produce more cancer causing agents than a small IC engine with that mix of fuel.
EDIT: According to Manish, they're two stroke engines. The worst kind from an emissions standpoint.
--I blame it all on the Internet
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| parent )He'd been an A & P man at Hickam Field in WWII, rebuilding the 28 cylinder Double Wasp 2000 horsepower engines for F-4U Corsairs. In his shop he degreased everything in pure benzene, which was sold in hardware stores st the time. I remember that the substance smelled really wrong and unnatural, like bad poison. The man's in his eighties now and still going, though, despite practically bathing in the stuff for decades. I never touched it after smelling it once.
--In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
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| parent )In fact, a considerably significant number - more than 50%, AFAIK.
Statistics don't work on the individual.
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| parent )http://youtube.com/watch?v=c88-eLlSQzs
http://youtube.com/watch?v=gDP90MqZK4I&feature=related
The Aptera...Available late this year, or so I'm told for around $30,000...Reservations at the official web site.
http://www.aptera.com/
American's are such jerks for putting up with Bush and his oil cronies....Frack `em, I say, Frack `em dead....with the Aptera.
(Hell, everyone's making money on the current system, even Juker bless his anti-environmental heart, trash it and start over....it is there if we would just take it. And this goes for Tomsyl too who thinks maybe too small when he wants to gore Gore....a ten year horizon does not seem out of reach to me.)
Best Wishes,
Traveller
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)I will take a picture of you riding in it and blackmail you to within an inch of your life.
"Hey buddy, you forgot the wings!"
"How long do you have to practice taxiing before they let you in a real Piper Cub?"
"I'd hate to see the size of the frog that tadpole came from."
"Last time I saw something like that was under a microscope in biology class."
"You remind me of Woody Allen dressed as a sperm cell in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex . . ."
Etc.
--In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
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| parent )...I hate to be a first adopter, but I think it is gorgeous!
A drive from LA to NYC for less than 10 galleons!?!
True, it looks a little cramped....but what the hell, I like it...a lot.
You're just jealous.
Best Wishes, Traveller
(yes, I know the misspelling...I kind of like it)
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| parent )Is the electricity used to compress the air generated in conventional coal-burning plants without scrubbers, electrostatic precipitators, waste heat utilization etc.?
Edit: Those tanks look like they're made out of woven carbon fiber cloth, probably wrapped on a lost-foam core and then epoxied and baked till well done. Much lighter, and probably stronger than steel. But that would make those glue lines, not welds.
--In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
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)Though there is also the risk of catastrophic decompression. I wouldn't put, say, Phil Gramm in there....
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| parent ).
--Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. -JH
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| parent )Well, the aftermath, anyway: someone didn't check the integrity of the valve assembly on a tank before filling it; they later figured out that it must have been been cracked, probably from banging around in the bed of a truck. The valve assy. failed right where the threads enter the tank neck; failure occurred at an estimated 1700 psi. The tank went completely through a cinder block wall, then through a double exterior wall, then into a parking lot, luckily without hitting so much as an itinerant mongoose. Suggesting that if the necks of those tanks faced rearwards that Tata could get a little extra boost, kind of like a shot of nitrous. (into the car, not the driver.)
No one at the shop admitted anything, not even hearing a bang or a whoosh. The acted as if either a meteorite or a menehune had caused the holes.
--In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
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| parent )Yeah, that'll put some pep in your step. I can already imagine the zero-carbon version of the Darwin Awards JATO story. :)
--Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. -JH
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| parent )on the TV show "Pushing Daisies?" Fascinating technology--I'm surprised the Saudis didn't buy it up. What's the roaming distance?
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)Actually, they are here.
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| parent )For their consultants are known the world over for their inability to produce. I have personally rescued six TCS consultants from the worst contracts in the world. The TCS managers would routinely demand kickbacks from the consultants, and pack them six to a dingy apartment in Louisville. To read their resumes, one would think them the most experienced consultants on the planet, but it's all a pack of lies cooked up by TCS. Those poor kids were sent over here to the USA, but when confronted by a standard development environment, they freeze up like a deer in the headlights.
Tata Consulting Services is legendary, a curse and a byword in my industry.
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)We're in competition with some of their healthcare products. Why the NHS in the UK has chosen the, even as subcontractors is something I never understood. I guess they'll learn.
But on a another, different note, capitalism is about screwing the workers for what you can get from them.
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| parent )scewing the patients for what you can't give them ;)
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| parent )