By now, I am sure you may have heard about Air Car. We had covered Tata Motors backed air car couple of years back. People have been quite interested in this clean, green air car, but it has yet to see the light of the day. Now, I doubt whether it was for real or just a rumour !
Now, two Indian Engineers Bharat Raj Singh and Onkar Singh who are researchers at SMS institute of Technology, Lucknow have conceptually presented designed a new, cleaner motorcycle engine (or any other light vehicle engine) that uses compressed air to turn a small air turbine, generating enough power to run the vehicle for up to 40 minutes.
Here is an excerpt from white paper which has been published JRSE (Journal of renewable & sustainable energy) by these 2 Indian Engineers:
The use of compressed air for running prime mover such as air turbine offers a potential solution to these issues as it does not involve combustion in producing shaft work. The great advantages such as availability of air as fuel and the absence of emissions are also apparent from air motors.
Compressed air driven prime movers are also found to be cost effective compared to fossil fuel driven engines. Such prime movers have perennial compressed air requirement, which needs some source of energy for running the compressor.
The overall analysis shows that the compressed air system is quite attractive option for light vehicle applications.
Simply put, the paper puts forth a design that can be combined with a compressed air cylinder as a replacement for traditional internal combustion engines. In areas where motorcycles are a major source of public transportation, such a technology can drastically cut emissions if implemented appropriately.
To be honest with you, I am a bit skeptical of compressed air to be used in any kind of vehicle. I had read extensively about Air Car, infact, also had seen few videos of an Air car in action, but nothing really has transpired (There have been talks of even water car). As far as this goes, it is still at conceptual stage – It will probably take years, if not decades to come in reality.
The main impediment off-course is, all of them are based on compressed air, and if you need to compress air, you will off-course need to have some source of energy to do it !
Would love to hear your thoughts on this…