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Scott Robertson is an expert in the field of air cars, that is cars that run on compressed air. His website can be found at http://www.aircaraccess.com.
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The following interview was conducted by email, because it was impractical to do it by phone for several reasons. To hear the interview you can use the Robo Reader device. Cars that run on air are all the talk right now, with a company in India talking about exporting them to the U.S. next year. Ken:
Why can't either a higher pressure tank be installed on the cars or a bigger tank?
Scott Robertson:
High pressure air is dangerous if there is a leak. It can blind you or deafen you if you’re too close to it; if air is suddenly released all at once it makes a very loud sound, or a jet of high pressure air escaping through a small hole can hurt you. Also a loose tank with a broken-off valve can fly like a missile right through a brick wall. As with any form of concentrated energy, you have to have safety practices and encourage the untrained to get trained before handling the stuff. I almost got killed once in my workshop by doing something without thinking first, and another time a big tank at 200 psi lost pressure suddenly when a gasket blew out, with my head right next to it. So you have to learn along the way, but use common sense. Compressed air is the safest form of concentrated energy known to man, but not if you let it kill you.
Bigger tanks—where will the people sit? We could go back to large mass transportation like trains and buses and we probably should and probably will. The passenger car might not live through this century no matter what powers it. In a big vehicle you can line the underbelly with long tanks, but on a passenger car your options are limited. Also on a big bus or train you can put pedals under every passenger’s feet and make them pay for their ride by contributing to the turning of the compressor shaft. You can’t make gasoline that way.
I’m serious.
Ken:
How do you feel the air car stacks up against the fuel cell car or any of the potential other techniques for powering an auto, such as electrical or hydrogen?
I don’t know anything about fuel cells. I heard that hydrogen takes more power to make than it delivers, which could be a problem, if your hydrogen fuel is manufactured in a factory that is powered on hydrogen. Also hydrogen engines exhaust water, which is supposed to be an advantage, but in winter do you want a lot of water on the street? Not that I know of. Personally I hate driving on a sheet of ice.
Electric batteries are heavy and toxic and have a short life, so they have to be replaced every few years at a huge cost. They are not environmentally inert like worn out air tanks. How long does it take to wear out an air tank? Maybe longer than the life of the car. As for exotic materials used to make batteries “better”, where are we going to mine these materials? The moon, or Jupiter? The electric car is about as environmentally friendly as what makes it go, coal and petroleum-powered generating plants, evil batteries that have no place to go when they die, short range and long recharge time. The electric motor is very heavy and expensive.
I helped air car inventor Terry Miller run his air car show in 1985 when he was a main attraction at the Wichita Energy Expo. We had people lined up all day and all night to ride in the air car, which looked like a workbench on wheels, because that’s exactly what it was, while the shiny new electric car next to us sat idle most of the weekend, its owner looking very depressed.
People love air cars. The idea of running a car on the thing that makes our bodies alive, naturally speaks to the human heart and spirit. The alternatives are a waste of time. It’s air or back to the ox-cart.
Ken:
Cars that run on compressed air seem to be a threat to big oil. Do you foresee that big oil will either buy out all the patents or the auto companies that produce the cars?
Scott Robertson:
The oil companies will do what they can to monopolize the automobile until the day it costs more than a barrel of oil to squeeze a barrel of oil out of the ground. Then they’ll just pursue some other way of making a vast profit from our gullibility, laziness and greed. People aren’t hard to manipulate and exploit, if you’re a corporate marketeer with no conscience. But they have nothing against air cars, as such; it isn’t personal.
Of course once we have air in our car’s fuel tanks, someone will figure out how to hit us with a “breathing tax”. I hope I don’t live that long. They’ll probably tell you that air is bad for you and put a gas mask with a meter on your face, and send a meter reader to see you once a month. If you don’t pay, they plug your mouth hole. It would make a good Woody Allen movie.
Ken:
It would seem to me that this technology lends itself to many other uses. Do you see an air powered plane in our future?
Scott Robertson:
Bill Truitt said his engine was used to power a helicopter by the US Army, but the helicopter could only go 50 feet in the air. The power needed is vast, and air gets colder and less dense as you go higher. I don’t know much about it, but I’m kind of skeptical that we even need air travel.
Ken:
What about air powered outboards? This would certainly eliminate the occasional explosions that gasoline powered boats face.
Scott Robertson:
Ships and boats (except submarines) have access to not only air, but also to the best source of ambient heat, which is sea water. Water holds a lot more heat than air,so if self-fueling air engines can be made to work, then they can be made to work better in boats. And at sea level air is nice and dense, unlike up in the sky. And it’s exposed to the sun.
Ken:
What other uses could we put air powered engines to?
Scott Robertson:
There is at least one company today, that will pipe compressed air to your business or home. Anything that is done mechanically can be done by air. The first artificial hearts were run by air. I already mentioned Paris. I would like an air powered blender, because my wife uses ours to crush ice so it doesn’t last very long. Air motors, unlike electric motors, are totally undamaged by stalling. That’s why they’re used for rock drills.
Ken:
Do you think that there is any application for compressed air engines in the field of space travel?
Scott Robertson:
No.
Ken:
I have read that if auxiliary power was used, say about 8 gallons of biodiesel, the air car could travel as far as 1,000 miles between fill ups. Is this correct and if so please explain the type of auxiliary engine that would be used?
Scott Robertson:
Just heat the air with the fuel. An engineer of the olden days who was also a textbook writer published an article in a technical journal about closed-cycle pneumatic power plants. He said that any time you add more heat to compressed air, by any source, than what was added to it by the compressor that compressed it, then you will have an over unity situation, in other words, the tank pressure will not go down.
I already mentioned that it is seven times less costly to add heat to existing compressed air than to compress more air. I get all this information from technical journals, I don’t make it up. I never would have dreamed all this stuff could be true. In 1979 when I started, I was working at a pipe organ factory, and pipe organs run on low pressure air. I just wanted to make a little wooden bellows car, like the bamboo car on Gilligan’s island, but you’d pedal a bellows instead of pedaling the wheels. Before that I thought maybe you could run a car on a very loud sound. Not so far off, they’re already running refrigerators on sound.
Ken:
Who is producing air cars now?
Scott Robertson:
As for actual production, nobody. Everyone’s waiting to see if Tata Motors in India really puts Guy Negre's air car on the market. I hope they do, because it will break the ice and get the ball rolling. There is a company in Korea that wants to develop an air-electric hybrid, and an inventor in Australia named Anthony Di Pietro whose design is well iked by those who have reviewed his work. I don’t know if Ford really intends to put their hybrid on the market, or if they’re still working on it.
Ken:
I noticed that some of the vehicles that are rated at 150 miles between fill ups, have only 25 horse power. If I have a car with about 140 horse power and it weighed about 2600 pounds, much as the Honda Civic, what sort of range do you think that I would get on a tank of compressed air?
Scott Robertson:
It’s not that straightforward to compare horsepower between IC engines and air engines. It’s torque that really turns an axle, that is twisting force, not horsepower. The expansion engine has its best torque at zero-plus speed, that is, starting speed. So if it starts up a hill, the engine just slows down until it's torque rises to meet the challenge, resulting in huge climbing power and starting power. I mean torque. Big horsepower is needed from gas engines, because they’re literally sickly, they have a temperature, they literally want to explode and it’s a miracle that anyone ever got one to work. A miracle from the dark side, I might add.
From an old engineering article we learn that a 20 horsepower steam car (that’s an expansion engine identical to an air engine) will easily overtake an 80 horsepower gas car going up a hill. Terry Miller’s prototype air car, which I drove for two days, was made of bolted-together parts bought from the hardware store, and with no shock absorbers, it was scary at 42 miles per hour! Its engine had less than five horsepower.
I made a little go-kart once from a worn-out, leaky old wood boring air drill that I bought at a junk yard, and a scuba tank with 120 psi shop air. I sat it down headed up hill and opened the valve, and it started so fast up a hill that I couldn’t control the steering. I don’t think Henry Ford had that problem with his first car.
Lee Rogers’s air car will lift the front wheels from the pavement, if he pushes too hard on the accelerator. Bill Truitt had to put a limiter on his accelerator valve, because it was scary to drive, it went too fast. He was using 90 psi, and as he said, “They said it couldn’t be done…” His engine was an old refrigeration compressor from a big refrigerator truck, with valves added to operate the cylinders.
Ken:
Why did the Eolo Car, a version of the air car, fail to get into production in Italy in 2003?
Scott Robertson:
I don’t know, please send me the info you have on it. I stopped collecting information when the Internet took over; my research is all from the library, you know, where we used to go for information before the miracle of the Internet
Ken:
Didn't locomotives that ran on air exist in the 19th century and wasn't the idea put forward in England in the late 1600s?
Scott Robertson:
I don’t know how far it goes back. Someone named Ctesibius is credited by one source with the actual discovery of compressed air, that goes way back before engines. I think he was the first barber or something. I covered air locomotives above. In 1870 James Clerk Maxwell told us how we should think about air engines and the second law of thermodynamics. Maxwell discovered the electromagnetic spectrum and was the first to predict discoveries to come, using mathematics. He predicted the discovery of x-rays, gamma rays, etc. Einstein called him the father of modern physics.
Maxwell said you can avoid the law against using dissipated energy to do work with an air tank, if you can sort the hot molecules from the cold molecules and put them in the two halves of the tank, isolated from each other. Then you run an air engine on the differential pressure. The sorting process is to be very low-key, something a little elf could do. Not beating the air to death with a compressor banging on it, something more subtle. The energy source is continuous, from the sun, so it’s not beating the 2nd law, just thumbing its nose at it.
Basically he was saying that standard air compressors are a case of cutting daisies with chainsaws. Of course the physics people took hold of the little elf and forgot about the air and the tank. The abstractionists have made “Maxwell’s Demon” sound ridiculous, by keeping the 140 years of controversy well away from the topic of unequal zones of pressure in an air tank, out of the hardware completely, and into the ivory-tower world of pure abstraction, where the backyard mechanic who can save the world with air cars will never be bothered with usable information.
Tesla informed us in 1900 that a cold spot in an air pressure power cycle should provide us with a self-fueling air engine, and it was at that time that you started to see people in the technical world thinking of supplying ambient heat to compressed air engines.
Ken:
What prevented the further development of these historical vehicles into automobiles?
Scott Robertson:
The high energy content of a gallon of gas, as well as its formerly low cost. When I got my driver’s license, gas cost 26 cents a gallon, so that’s an increase over 35 years of about 1500%. We can only hope that someone will get out into his garage and stay there till he finishes a real air car, and then instead of sitting on it or selling it to Detroit to hide, giving it to the world.
Ken:
I saw where there have been cars that ran on compressed air. There was one in the early 1930s and it was said to be able to go 500 miles at 35 miles per hour. What stopped this from going into production do you think?
Scott Robertson:
Every air car inventor who had remarkable results was asked to stop as soon as he got a patent or a newspaper article published. For example, Bob Neal developed a self-fueling air engine in 1934 and was refused a patent, because the Patent Office said it was a perpetual motion machine. He built a small working model and took it to Washington DC to show it to them, and they had to give him his patent, because it worked.
But the Germans saw his patent and came to his house, demanding his secret. This was before the war, so Nazis were still allowed in the US. He refused, so they kidnapped his daughter. Bob Neal was a simple shoemaker in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, he did what he had to do and got his daughter back. The family says he took the engine apart and scattered the pieces and never touched it again. A man who met him later in his life recruited me to try and make Neal’s dream come true, long after Neal died. Thus the emphasis on Bob Neal’s work on my website, HTTP;//www.AirCarAccess.com.
Ken:
Would you buy an air car right now if one was available?
Scott Robertson:
Yeah, and if I couldn’t afford one, I’d sell my soul for one. But none are available right now.
Ken:
Will a car that runs on compressed air still have all the amenities such as power steering, power brakes, air conditioning and such and if so, what will this do to the mileage?
Scott Robertson:
No reason why it shouldn’t have the works, if the self-fueling system becomes a reality. If it’s a standard air car, the stop and fill it up variety, then extras would be a drain on the range possible between fill ups. You’d have to have a heater for the passenger compartment, and lights, and a DVD player, but some of the other stuff is extra.
Ken:
What do you think the military applications of a compressed air vehicle might be and would it actually have any advantages over a diesel or gas vehicle in the theater of war?
Scott Robertson:
War people would kill you with a daisy if they could make a profit doing it. I hate to think what would happen if the self-fueling air car went into production for purposes of killing. Not having to stop for refueling would be an obvious advantage. Not being operational on the moon, the main disadvantage. I assume that when man is living on the moon, we’ll have war there too.
Ken:
I see that Business Week is reporting that the first air car that is going into production will have a powerful computer in it. The car seems to be very basic. Why is such a powerful computer necessary in such a basic package, do you think?
Scott Robertson:
I don’t know which air car that is. Please send me the article. For example, the Ford/UCLA air car is to have electronic valves, no camshaft. So it would need a computer. I’ve always been for keeping it strictly mechanical, but I don’t know anything about electricity. The best use for electricity would be for heating the fuel air, as resistance heating is 100% efficient. Picture a pair of check valves in a series, inside a tank, at the discharge end of a compressor pumping air into the tank. Between the two check valves, a heavy duty heater. A pulsing of air into the tank will be caused that literally sucks the air out of the compressor, lowering its work load to almost nothing. I think this is what Bob Neal was doing.
Ken:
The new car is said to have a top speed of only 68 miles per hour, with a range of anywhere between 120 miles to 180 miles and is more of a city car. How long do you think it will be before a car comparable to a gasoline car is produced?
Scott Robertson:
We have to wait for someone to come along and give their invention to the general public, like Terry Miller did. By the way, where I live, most vehicles go about 20 mph tops and have to be refueled maybe six times a day to keep going. No one complains.
Ken:
I see that the new car has a compressor that takes 3 to 4 hours to fill the tank. Do you think that we will ever see one that will do it in the time that you can fill a gas tank?
Scott Robertson:
Yes, the idea of filling your car by plugging it in to an electrical outlet is not realistic. There will be air stations with huge compressors filling very big tanks so that you stop and just transfer air from the big stationary tank to the one in your car. It is very fast, but should be done by qualified individuals, no self-service. That’s no big deal, in Oregon they’ve never had self-service gas. No one complains, it’s easier to stay in the car. With a big enough pipe, the fill-up could take less than a minute.
Ken:
Costs of running a car are a big part of the driving experience for many people. Aside from the price of fuel, how do all the other costs stack up? I am talking about fluid changes, repair costs and such.
Scott Robertson:
Because the air engine is many times simpler than any combustion engine, there are fewer parts, fewer peripheral systems, they’re easier to design and build, easier to repair, etc. They run cold, not hot, so lubricating oil lasts several times longer, as well as all the parts.
Ken:
Is there any reason that you know of, that would prevent compressed air cars from passing the safety tests in the US?
Scott Robertson:
Political corruption. Influence in the wrong places. Intimidation, people are afraid of anything pressurized, it is natural. People are not afraid of gasoline; that is unnatural. There will be a breaking-in period where people get used to the idea and stop being afraid. In the meantime, the status quo can and does emphasize the dangers of compressed air, even though it’s the safest of the alternatives. I wouldn’t want to touch a high pressure leak of compressed air, but I’d choose it over a high voltage leak of electricity or a flare of burning fuel.
Ken:
Is a compressed air car truly zero pollution, after all there are fluids, batteries and such in the car?
Scott Robertson:
Nothing we do in life, including eating, is 100% zero pollution. But the fluids in an air car last longer, the batteries don’t have to do much since they’re not used to run a heavy starter motor. There are ways of having oil less compressors and air engines, for example, cylinders made of epoxy embedded with Teflon particles. But then what about particles of Teflon coming off in the atmosphere?
Well, what about particles of asbestos coming off in the air when you apply your brakes? You have to accept some dirt in the world if you want any kind of machinery.
Ken:
If an electric car came out that ran on solar cells, would the air car still be the car of choice and if so, why?
Scott Robertson:
Yes, because the air car uses a type of solar energy, dissipated ambient heat that is at large in the atmosphere, which is available all night long. Solar cells depend on something that is available only part of the day, sunshine. Ambient heat is always available, because the sun is always shining somewhere.
Ken:
Please tell us anything else that I have missed that you think we should know about compressed air powered cars.
Scott Robertson:
One thing.
Is the world ready for air cars? Do we even deserve something so perfect and convenient? What if we had free fuel, as much as we wanted. What would we do with such abundance? Party and fight and struggle, like always.
What we really really need, in my opinion, is not cars of any kind, but a vegetable garden in every home, and happy families. |
