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kbd512

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Registered: 2015-01-02

Posts: 7,857

Compressed Air Powered Drones and Motor Vehicles

These are all benchtop toys / curiosities or RC toys that run on compressed air:
Tom Stanton - 4,500RPM Air Engine

Tom Stanton - Optimising an Air Engine

Tom Stanton - Flying a Plane Powered by AIR

Tom Stanton - Air Bottle Helicopter

Camden Bowen - Variable Valve Timing Air Engine

Camden Bowen - 3D Printed Four Cylinder Engine

This is a real all-metal air powered engine for a motor vehicle (about the same size as a typical motorcycle engine, in a VW Beetle):
Air Engine Research - Air Powered Car, The Engine is in -Short 8-3-24

tahanson43206

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Registered: 2018-04-27

Posts: 19,417

Re: Compressed Air Powered Drones and Motor Vehicles

This post is reserved for an index to posts that may be contributed by NewMars members over time.

(th)

kbd512

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Registered: 2015-01-02

Posts: 7,857

Re: Compressed Air Powered Drones and Motor Vehicles

MiniCat air powered concept car (this prototype vehicle was actually built, but never mass-produced):

Compressed air drag racing vehicle powered by an air turbine (from a helicopter, I think):

Compressed air farm utility vehicle:

Study on Compressed Air Engine, by Cai Maolin and Yu Qihui, School of Automation Science and Electrical Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, China

kbd512

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Registered: 2015-01-02

Posts: 7,857

Re: Compressed Air Powered Drones and Motor Vehicles

Stellantis CEO, Carlos Tavares, has his conglomerate actively developing a compressed air / internal combustion engine hybrid vehicle as a more affordable substitute for an EV, with the power plant to be put into new Jeep branded vehicles.

tahanson43206

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Registered: 2018-04-27

Posts: 19,417

Re: Compressed Air Powered Drones and Motor Vehicles

Following up on Post #4 by kbd512:

About
Carlos Antunes Tavares Dias is a Portuguese businessman. He is the chief executive officer of Stellantis, the world's fourth largest automaker by sales, formed by the merger of the PSA Group and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. He was formerly the chief operating officer at Renault. Wikipedia
Born: 1958 (age 65 years), Lisbon, Portugal
Education: Ecole Centrale Paris (1981), School Pierre De Fermat, CentraleSupélec, Liceu Francês Charles Lepierre
Nationality: Portuguese
Children: 3

This is an 8 minute video about the hybrid idea...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZrRTE_groU

After viewing the video, I estimate the useful content is about 30 seconds out of the 8 minutes. There are some nice animations that might or might not be the actual engine, but I didn't pick up much detail about how the hybrid system will work. This does appear to be an attempt worth watching closely. 

(th)

kbd512

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Registered: 2015-01-02

Posts: 7,857

Re: Compressed Air Powered Drones and Motor Vehicles

In other related news, Stellantis has offered to "buy out" American-based Chrysler employees and is in the process of dissolving the US-based portion of the company, selling off Chrysler's US-based assets such as their headquarters, and moving the manufacturing of Chrysler brands to Europe.  This is merely another example of the economic destruction wrought by a hostile foreign takeover of an American company.  Most Chrysler employees will be without jobs within this year, or by the beginning of next year.  Chrysler was a great American company, but now it's the latest victim of "woke" ideology.  We've seen similar destruction of various other iconic American brands in the mad quest to produce unsustainable EVs.  Everything must be sacrificed on the alter of woke-ism, DEI, and fake environmentalism.  Stellantis has already fired most or all of Chrysler's engineering staff.  That happened about 4 months ago.  Now it's in the process of closing Chrysler's remaining US-based facilities or moving them to Europe.

General Motors and Ford have also committed economic and brand suicide with EVs, rather than tell these arrogant little anti-humanists turds to get bent.

kbd512

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Registered: 2015-01-02

Posts: 7,857

Re: Compressed Air Powered Drones and Motor Vehicles

Stellantis reportedly lost 48% of their profit from the first half of the year, presumably when compared to the first half of the prior year, after US sales fell 18% and European sales fell by 6%.  This was blamed on "marketing strategy", despite rolling out 20 new models.  Whatever the reason, it looks like the entire US portion of Chrysler will be shut down.

Lucid is presently losing over $100K per EV sold, but at least that's down, or "up", from losing over $300K per EV sold.

Nissan is entirely non-profitable and is looking for a buyout / takeover by Honda.

BMW and VW Group are also in a sales slump.

The EV market, even in China, appears to be stagnant or fully saturated, which aptly explains the hundreds of thousands of EVs rotting away in fields, never to be sold to anyone.  The government apparently also confiscated significant numbers of EV and ICE motorcycles, either believing them to be dangerous or obsolescent (something to do with the battery tech used).  Apparently, it would cost more money to replace the battery with acceptable / "safer" newer models than to make / buy a brand new EV, so the old ones which were never sold or not allowed to be sold merely sit there until the batteries catch fire or the Earth reclaims the metal.  I guess nobody "thought ahead" far enough to know how important recycling is to EVs.

EVs were always a solution in search of a problem to solve, but now we're discovering just how bad they are and will become for the environment.

SpaceNut

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From: New Hampshire

Registered: 2004-07-22

Posts: 29,433

Re: Compressed Air Powered Drones and Motor Vehicles

Your post reminded me of Running on Compressed Air? topic

the image is here back in 2008-03-11 21:43:37 that i made

Kbd512 post on tanks

kbd512

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Registered: 2015-01-02

Posts: 7,857

Re: Compressed Air Powered Drones and Motor Vehicles

SpaceNut,

It's probably the same vehicle design.

I initially read about and watched GM's EV program with great interest.  I briefly held a menial job at Dell while I was still in college and got to know and talk to one of the engineers who worked on that program for GM back in the 1990s.  I forget what he did, but I recall he was involved with testing.  He was working on the software and calibration for Dell's computer handling robots at their Parmer Lane facility, before they closed it and moved production overseas.

GM's initial EV designs had the right mix of sophistication and complexity to make them worthy successors to combustion engines, vehicles that truly were simpler and feasibly more reliable.  The problem, of course, was the range limitations imposed by the battery tech.  GM's management truly believed nobody would buy the cars due to the range and charging times, which is why they killed the project.  The company crushed the cars because they didn't want someone else stealing their ideas.  The EV1s were about as heavy as normal cars, and performed much like normal cars of the 1990s.  Range was shorter, but they were smooth, quiet, and he told me when they took the cars to the track they easily bested the 0-60 times of the Corvette, as well as the Corvette's top speed.  They were expensive, even back then, but GM thought mass production would reduce the cost to something comparable to that of a regular gasoline engine car of similar size, using Lead-acid batteries (the only kind of battery we actually recycle in quantity, at better than 95%).  The batteries weighed 1,175lbs, or about the same as a Cummins 6BT turbo diesel engine with all fluids and accessories.  Modern Lead-acid batteries would weigh about 825 to 948lbs for the same capacity as the EV1 Gen II's Panasonic Lead-acid batteries.  The cost of SLA batteries would be $3,379 at retail prices, according to Amazon.  The Lithium batteries were and are so expensive that they simply could not be made for less money, ever.  Long story short, since then we've increased complexity and cost to the point where they're no longer practical daily drivers, much like a Corvette.  50% of the cost of every modern vehicle is the electronics it contains.

Now it's time to go the other direction with the overall complexity of the energy store and power plant.  I can't seem to get anyone else to recognize and accept that the entire reason EVs never took off was the continual addition of more complexity and therefore cost.  No thought was ever given to recycling and ultimate sustainability.  Every modern vehicle, regardless of what powers it, has been transformed into a train wreck of production and maintenance costs stemming from pointless over-complication and a desire to post higher performance numbers than competitors.  Any vehicle owner who wishes to turn their grocery getter into a Rube Goldberg machine can do that on their own time with their own dime.  Everyone else who only needs a practical grocery getter doesn't need to pay through the nose for the automotive engineering workfare programs catering to middle-aged single men who want a sports car.

The GM S10 EV consumed 276Wh per mile... in 1998.  A 2024 Tesla Model 3 consumes about 250Wh per mile...  in 2024.  Both vehicles have very similar weight, but the Tesla has considerably better aerodynamics.  Either overall energy usage efficiency hasn't improved all that much using Lithium-ion batteries or significant progress on improving energy consumption is simply not possible.  I'll wager that the only substantive difference over the past 30 years is modestly improved electric motor and power electronics technology, plus the aerodynamics advantage of a very slippery car vs a small pickup truck.

Modern automotive safety technology peaked between the late 1990s and early 2000s.  Pedestrian and motorist deaths are on the rise once again because all the extra safety features make drivers feel as though the vehicle's electronics can protect them from their imprudent decisions or utter lack of skill at driving, except that they obviously don't.  The proof is the butcher's bill.

We could choose to build practical EVs and practical compressed air cars that would be adopted en-masse because they would be less costly and longer lasting than internal combustion engine vehicles, but we're doing nothing of the sort, so adoption is limited to wealthy people who can afford to live with impractical cars.  They need to have 4 wheels, 4 seats, heating, air conditioning, power windows, anti-lock brakes, and proper restraint systems.  Whether or not they could possibly be some fraction of a percent more efficient than X / Y / Z brand or vehicle is far less relevant to mass adoption than total cost and practicality.

Lead-acid is practical, cost-effective, infinitely recyclable, and almost entirely recycled in actual present day practice.

Compressed air is also infinitely recyclable, the components used for storage are very long-lasting compared to any kind of battery, and gravity can provide most of the energy input.

No amount of religious belief in technology improvement will ever change what is so painfully obvious after looking at all the input requirements to make a meaningful change in the energy sources we consume.  All I see is a lot of hubris-based talking points not backed up by actual output.  We're demanding both energy and materials far beyond our ability to inject more of what's being demanded into the various input resource pools.  That's why technological, cultural, and social progress has either stalled or reversed.  We're going through a reset.  What else could possibly happen?  We've seen this all before.  It's not part of our recent history in the Western world, but the results were still dutifully recorded in the history books.  People who think lasting change is swift or easy should dust off a few of those books to discover how long it took to build the modern society they're a part of.  Maybe it'll dissuade a few of them from destroying it so flippantly, or at least give them a sense for how long things take.  People still ride horses and plow fields with water buffaloes in an age of AI-enabled super computers.  We've come a long way, but we still have so far to go it's not even funny.  Humanity flourishes in times of abundance and withers in times of scarcity.  Bring back the abundance and many more things become possible.

SpaceNut

Administrator

From: New Hampshire

Registered: 2004-07-22

Posts: 29,433

Re: Compressed Air Powered Drones and Motor Vehicles

I printed the picture of the air dragster, in post 3 and a coworker commented on see it on my wall. Now only to find parts for making something like it to see how to build from what I can salvage.