anti-engineer wrote:
Shame on you. Engineers should ALWAYS analysis the big picture, not analyze something with blinders on. You forgot something important. Air is everywhere, it takes no effort to find it. If you can breath it, it's there. Gasoline takes effort to find, and a lot of energy to turn into a useful fuel. The gasoline engine is not as wonderful as you believe. Do your own overall efficiency analysis, I won't do your homework four you.
You're going off on a tangent. I said that the energy density of compressed air is very crappy, which it is. The amount of it that you would need to carry to have the requisite amount of stored energy for an automobile is quite large.
That that "air is there, you can breathe it" is stupid, if you think that it's a good proof of why compressed air is a good energy source. The air that you breathe is 15 psi. The air you need to use in a compressed air vehicle is 1,000-10,000 psi. You may not be an engineer, but I trust that you can understand that those numbers are different.
However, if you want to talk about overall energy efficiency, it's still a loss. Compressed air is JUST A WAY TO STORE ENERGY, it is not a means by which to create energy. As such, there is no way you can just "side by side" compare compressed air to gasoline, without making a lot of assumptions about how the compressed air was created in the first place (ie by burning fossil fuels, through solar energy, wind power, or most likely some mix of all of these and others). However, we know that nothing is 100% efficient, so you will lose some energy.
For the record, the extraction and refinement of gasoline gives you approximately 5 times the energy that you must put it to fuel the whole process.
http://www.consumerenergyreport.com/2006/04/08/energy-balance-for-ethanol-better-than-for-gasoline/Provide proof of your claim "the fact it doesn't work very well." The burden is on you, not me.
See previous point, regarding energy density. This is the primary reason why it doesn't work well. I don't need to prove that a product that doesn't really exist doesn't work well, if you want to hawk that product you have to prove its merit. Expecting otherwise is like me telling you to buy my new running shoe with jell-o soles, stainless steel laces, and lead cushioning, and then asking you to prove that it doesn't work.
Provide evidence proving the oil industries have NO interest in gasoline engines. Every heard of service stations? Who do you think owns them, and supplies the gasoline?
As a reminder, the original context of this was a suggestion that, in the early days of the development of the gasoline engine (before mass production cars existed), oil companies exerted influence in such a way to force gasoline engines into cars, as opposed to yet-unspoken alternatives. Now, your "evidence" for this is service stations? You are going to claim that oil companies had a whole bunch of service stations sitting around, while people were still riding horses, and that is why they wanted gasoline engines? Think. As I already said, the context was during the development of the mass produced automobile and the internal combustion engine. I'd hesitate to suggest that service stations were a factor in the late 1800's (when the Otto cycle was first "discovered").
Care to take another stab at it?
[quote]Study automotive history. Go see an automobile museum. You'll be amazed at the supposedly revolutionary technologies that were available before the gasoline engine; external combustion, rotary, electric, steam, etc. Amazing stuff.
