Tata Developing Air Car?
Tata Developing Air Car?
Indian automaker looks to ride on thick air.
For decades, automotive engineers have been working with the idea of a car that would run on compressed air – or, to elucidate, use compressed air as an energy storage method.
That reality might be a lot closer. Only recently brought to our attention through Gizmag, Indian automaker Tata Motors last month entered an agreement with France ‘s MDI Group, a company founded in the 1990s to develop a compressed-air engine that could fit a variety of uses.
Although Tata hasn’t yet announced its intent with the technology, and its product may not take the form of the boxy, lightweight Air Car variants as MDI envisions them, the automaker will likely use the core technology developed by MDI, which includes both a so-called single-fuel engine which runs only on compressed air and a double-fuel engine that runs on compressed air at lower speeds and can switch to conventional fuels for speeds above 50 km/h (31 mph).
The engine uses a unique connecting rod design that allows the piston to stay at top dead center for 70 percent of the crankshaft rotation, allowing pressure to build. It’s paired with a plastic-fiber high-pressure storage tank, similar to what’s used with natural-gas vehicles, which keeps the air up to a pressure of more than 4000 psi and can be recharged at an air station in about three minutes. The range is supposedly better than 200 km (124 miles).
The arrangement, as you might expect, has nearly no emissions at the tailpipe (though of course overall efficiency depends on the compressor used to fill (pressurize) the tank. The engine’s lubrication oil, a liter of vegetable oil, needs to be changed once every 50,000 km (31,000 miles). And, the air expelled may actually be cleaner than the air taken in, as it is run through a carbon filter to remove larger contaminants that might be damaging.
Considering the burgeoning demand for vehicles in emerging markets, the compressed-air engine system could be a potential interim solution for maintaining growth in the vehicle sector if the price of gasoline were to spike. With MDI proposing complete cars beginning at about 6800 euros ($9000), the system also likely costs much less than electric-car components and has similar potential to help improve air quality in smog-choked emerging-market big cities.
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