Has nobody heard of the laws of thermodynamics?

Cheaper maybe, until the government cottons on to taxing air sold for road traction purposes (AERV?), but I can't imagine it is particularly efficient in its overall use of energy.

have a look at this the history section at least is interesting.

Nick H

You are living in the world of the mad, or at least surfing in it !

What they don't show is the big trailer and pressure cylinder it has to tow around. How the devil do they get a range of 200 to 300km ! I suppose in an emergency you can connect up the spare tyre and get a

50km reserve, or get the passenger to work the foot pump and go round the world (eventually).

Its funny that I was talking to someone about hydrogen powered cars the other day, and it is planned to use hydrogen stored at 760bar. I commented that at that pressure you didn't need to burn it, you could just use the gas pressure to drive the car - maybe this is the next logical step.

I don't think the issue is thermodynamic efficiency so much as clean mobile power (bring back the trolleybus!), after all, compressing hydrogen to 760bar just to get a useful storage density is hardly very efficient. The tricky thing is to get a decent power density in a light weight. The new storage tanks for the hydrogen are aluminium and carbon fibre, so it may be worth doing the sums for the energy density for compressed air storage. It might not be quite as daft as it appears.

Steve