Are you often drives a car or motorcycle to travel from one place to another? Even though sometimes it's quite reachable using a bike or travel on foot. Have you know how much carbon dioxide each vehicle produce daily? Can you imagine how dirty is the air in our beloved Earth right now because of the excess exhaust gases coming from the vehicles owned by each and every person?
It has been known for a long time that technology advancements especially in transportation has contributed to the destruction of nature. Exhaust gases contain air pollutant particles such as carbon dioxide that become the main cause of global warming, carbon monoxide which is a toxic material and dangerous for living beings, also sulfur dioxide and nitro dioxide which are the causes for acid rains which is quite destructive with its corrosive nature.
So, how could we solve this problem? Many scientists have tried to use alternative energy sources such as electric, water, hydrogen, solar cell, and many others. These inventions are proved to be much environmental-friendly than carbon based fuels that are primarily used for cars nowadays. However, the problem is always about the cost of production. These advanced vehicles required expensive components to make them work such as solar panel that increased its price significantly. This has caused many people to still rely on fossil fuel because it is much more cheaper and easy to use.
Citroen Survolt, Concept Electric Race Car
So, how could we create alternative energy vehicle that is both cleaner and cheaper? Behold, the newest idea scientists had in mind. Air powered vehicle, or should I say, air propelled vehicle because the air is not used as the reactants of chemical reaction to be turned in to other substance through combustion. Rather, it is used to push the vehicle forward using released high pressure compressed air.
This idea was showed at National Geographic's Planet Mechanic: Air Propelled Sandwich episode where Jem tried to create air based vehicle for food catering service.
The experiment went on using bicycle as the vehicle. The bike used carbon-fiber air tanks that are usually used by firefighters as part of their breathing equipment and connected them to two rotary air engines that drive the rear wheel. One of the benefits of using compressed air over batteries is that you can recharge in a few seconds. Of course, the compressor works on electricity, so that’s not always a clean power source. But even if your local utility uses coal, if you recharge at night or off peak, chances are you are using power that would be wasted otherwise because coal power plants take too long to shut down and restart, so they are often kept producing at night. But it is with a clean electricity source for the compressor that the air-powered motorcycle becomes a truly green ride.
Still, it has several downside such as the needs to be recharged quickly because the air supplies in the tank are depleted at a significant rate. Also, you need to have pure air as the main ingredients for the air supplies because polluted air would result in also polluted emission. What enter the tank also come out from it. Thus, the reliability of the emission grade of this vehicle depends on the cleanliness or purity of the air supplies it had.
Whatever the disadvantages are, this invention still hold the place as one of the most clean and environmentally friendly vehicle ever. It still has so many chance to be developed. I hope they would be able to make a vehicle that can used air that are already available around us instead of pure air as air supplies and can turn it in to fresh air that will be released by the vehicle. How cool it would be if it really happened huh??
Hmm this post is truly effective; you have defined the core factors in your write-up. Thanks have a peek here
ReplyDelete