Advantages
The principal advantages of an air powered vehicle are:
- Refueling can be done at home using an air compressor or at service stations. The energy required for compressing air is produced at large centralized plants, making it less costly and more effective to manage carbon emissions than from individual vehicles.
- Compressed air engines reduce the cost of vehicle production, because there is no need to build a cooling system, spark plugs, starter motor, or mufflers.
- The rate of self-discharge is very low opposed to batteries that deplete their charge slowly over time. Therefore, the vehicle may be left unused for longer periods of time than electric cars.
- Expansion of the compressed air lowers its temperature; this may be exploited for use as air conditioning.
- Reduction or elimination of hazardous chemicals such as gasoline or battery acids/metals
- Some mechanical configurations may allow energy recovery during braking by compressing and storing air.
- Sweden’s Lund University reports that buses could see an improvement in fuel efficiency of up to 60 percent using an air-hybrid system But this only refers to hybrid air concepts (due to recuperation of energy during braking), not compressed air-only vehicles.
Read more about this topic: Compressed Air Car
Famous quotes containing the word advantages:
“The respect for human rights is one of the most significant advantages of a free and democratic nation in the peaceful struggle for influence, and we should use this good weapon as effectively as possible.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“... there are no chains so galling as the chains of ignorance—no fetters so binding as those that bind the soul, and exclude it from the vast field of useful and scientific knowledge. O, had I received the advantages of early education, my ideas would, ere now, have expanded far and wide; but, alas! I possess nothing but moral capability—no teachings but the teachings of the Holy Spirit.”
—Maria Stewart (1803–1879)
“In 1845 he built himself a small framed house on the shores of Walden Pond, and lived there two years alone, a life of labor and study. This action was quite native and fit for him. No one who knew him would tax him with affectation. He was more unlike his neighbors in his thought than in his action. As soon as he had exhausted himself that advantages of his solitude, he abandoned it.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)