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air powered car


smokin5s

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Well the concept he speaks of is true. There is a guy in France that builds "air-powered" cars. It's the dumbest idea ever. Instead of the piston being driven by the expanding gasses of combustion, it's pushed down by compressed air. However, you constantly lose pressure when it's running, thus losing power. Also, you have to use a compressor to compress the air and store it in the car. The compressor would run on electricity or gasoline.
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Yeah, gonna be BS on this one. Is it possible, sure. Problem is it's not fucking practical.

A car engine could be turned into an air motor with a different cam and some other minor mods. The real issue is getting enough air storage to get the thing to run long enough to get down your driveway and back up. Look at it with air powered paint ball. Those tanks are 4500 psi. But the air compressed in them is about 20 cubic feet. So even if you had a 4500 lb air supply, then you would need a regulator that would flow enough to drop it down to 600 PSI and still flow enough to fill the cylinders at a reasonable rate. And the size of the tank would need to be as big as a car for it to be useful for more than a few minutes. Then look at what it would take to fill the tanks. If you had a 500 gallon tank that was at 4500 PSI, it would take all night to bring it up to pressure. And compressing air to that sort of pressure requires alot of energy. So we are talking about either a 8 horse gas motor, or a 10 horse electric at bare minimum. Now since we all have single phase electric and not commercial 3 phase, the load as the compressor would get to pressure would be about 75 amps. That would be similar to 4 electric dryers running all night in your house. Your electric bill would be in the thousands of dollars, or you would be listening to the drone of a lawnmower engine all night, and feeding it gas. The energy would need to come from somewhere, it's not like you could hook a tire pump to it and produce the 600 PSI needed for it to run.

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