Compressed air powered vehicle design

• Main Author: Narendra, I Komang
• Other Authors: Ooi Kim Tiow
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Mechanical engineering::Motor vehicles
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/40573
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Nowadays the energy issue has been raised significantly, especially about oil and gas. This source of energy has been extensively used by humankind in order to support many field of life like transportation, power generator, mining, and etc. this over utilize of oil and gas will lead to scarcity problem of oil and gas. Beside the scarcity problem, the over usage of oil and gas cause the concentration of CO, COx, SOx, and dangerous acid are increasing. This increasing number of gases is caused by imperfect combustion process of the engine. With this increasing concentration of dangerous gas in the earth, the environment gradually changes and influences the ecosystem on earth. Due to these two problems, human try to alternate the energy from oil and gas into other forms which are environmentally friendly and support the ecosystem. For example, using solar power, wind power, waterfall, bio diesel, ethanol based fuel, hybrid fuel, and many more. One of the fields that use oil and gas extensively nowadays is the transportation. Transportation is one of the crucial points in human daily life because it supports many other aspect of life. To reduce the usage of oil and gas, the vehicle nowadays has been implemented by alternative energy technology. One of the technologies used is Compressed Air Engine (CAE). Compressed Air Engine is using highly pressurized air as its source of power to actuate the motion of the engine. This concept of engine has been started in 19th century. Recently in France, there is company which is aimed to be company that produces a car powered by air. This company is called Motor Development International (MDI). The founder was Guy Negre, former formula one engineer. He has been developed an Air engine which can reach 200 km with 175 liter air tank. This breakthrough invention is helping the air car even more feasible to be manufactured and mass produced. Air car is categorized as Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) which means it doesn’t pollute the environment. Air car is one of the promising solutions with the good simplicity, cheap manufacturing, and environmentally friendly. The study shows that this car can only has a short distance journey, any longer distance will cause overweight and over sizing to the design. the torque produced is influenced by pressure, mass flow rate, and process how the pressurized air is expanded whether isothermal, isentropic, or polytropic. In this paper, isothermal will give a highest performance among of them, but in reality to achieve this it acquire heating device which need another power source. One of the unique function from this air car is the expanded air can be functioned as air conditioning since it has a really low temperature. This is due to the extreme pressure drop which means extreme temperature drop as well. Compressed Air Technology can be combined with other green car concept like bio diesel, hybrid, ethanol based fuel, and others in order to achieve an outstanding performance.