New Gadget Blog Round Up
This week in gadget blogs and news from around the Net:
- Clone Trooper Voice Helmet – Technabob
- The 106 MPG “Air Car” – CNN
- Homes of the future are made of…Styrofoam - Gizmodo
- Ways for a More Productive Vista Desktop – Lifehacker
- Sony launches Cybershot DSC-T700 and DSC-T77 – Machines that Go Bing
- EA Sports won’t change the Madden 09 Cover with Favre in Packers Green – Kotaku
- Illuminating drum sticks for Rock Band – OhGizmo!
And this week in the Smarter Gadgets Blog we talked about:
- Delta to Add Wi-Fi to Domestic Flights in 2009
- SkyMall Coupon: Save 10% on Your Purchases
- Knock Yourself Out with the USB i-Knock IM Notifier
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Comment from Ed Every
This Air Car idea is a severely flawed concept even at the most basic level.
Pneumatic motors are notoriously inefficient even before you turn them on. The reason for this inefficiency is not the motor but the huge energy loss that occurs when you compressed air (or any gas for that matter).
When air is compressed to anything like the pressures envisioned, it rises in temperature. Compressing air to 4500 PSI makes it get hot – over 1000 degrees in this case.
Because it rises in temperature so much, you don’t get as many grams of air in the tank as you need – even at 4500 psi – so energy storage would be too low. So to get around that they cool the compressor and get rid of all the heat. Now orders of magnitude more air can fit in the tank at 4500 PSI.
The problem with doing that is energy loss. When you throw away all that heat in the compression process you are throwing away energy. In this case you are throwing away more than 50% of it!
Given the other losses in this process you would be very lucky if it was 25% energy efficient all told. This of course is far less energy efficient than charging batteries and using electric motors.
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