Next: The Roar Compressor

I didn’t really want to stop with pressure equalization but it seems to have an inherent problem. Which is that if you use a lot of air to compress a little air then you have to be satisfied with the pressure you end up with. If you want to recompress back up to tank pressure, it’s a loser, but if you can just use it from the equalized pressure, I think it will work. That’s one of the ideas that ended up inspiring me to use the term “downhill equalizer”. I hope to get back to it since it’s my baby. But the Equalization Engine in the form presented in my last book is dead, proved wrong by the right math.

Well whatever. I think I’ve found something better.

I am here to tell you that I don’t have time for this blog because I feel I have to keep it current and update it when I learn something, and because of that, I am not getting my new book put together. I can’t stop learning new stuff, it seems to never stop. So hopefully this new idea will hold steady for awhile and I can stay off the blog task long enough to compile Air Car Hall of Fame. It is going to be a most amazing book, definitely not a rehash of Self-Fueling Air Cars or any other of my books. In fact it is going to blow your mind.

As a preview I am going to write part of one of the chapters here on the blog. The new idea I’m about to share is not mine, and it’s not new. It’s from the late 19th century, that’s the 1890s. The inventor is pictured at the top of the blog. His name and other details will be included in the book. A sketch of the machine will also be near the top of this blog page. The URL for the associated spreadsheet is here. At this point I have not finished the math but the start I’ve made seems to promise overunity. I have to do a little study on flywheels and how to predict mathematically the part they will play.

spreadsheet:

http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B-DQiVAbbA7WNDYyYmNmMjUtYjkzMS00NzEwLTg4ZmUtMmQ2ODgwYzIzMmVk&hl=en

This is for now going to be called the Roar Compressor, for reasons that will be obvious when you read my book.

It is very simple.

An air tank has a compression cylinder attached to it so the two vessels communicate freely with no valve between them. Other than that, the head end of the compression cylinder—the end away from the tank—is typical, with check valves in the usual places. The intake check valves are in the head, and the piston rod is reciprocated by a crankshaft. The other end of the piston is in direct communication with tank pressure at all times. The head end of the compression cylinder pumps air through a pipe and check valve into the tank.

The crankshaft also carries two large flywheels, one on each end. Since there are opposing forces in this cycle, and forces that are not continuous, the flywheel is essential to store the extra work that is being done when it is not needed, so it will be there for the next part of the cycle when it is needed. The part of the cycle where the compression cylinder is pumping atmosphere into the tank through a pipe is the easy part, because full tank pressure is pushing against the back of the piston in order to do this work, and a lot of extra worked is stored for a short time by flywheel momentum. This is the out stroke, where the compression piston is moving away from the tank.

The other half of the cycle is the in stroke of the compression cylinder, which is the atmosphere intake stroke. The intake air pushes its own way into the cylinder, canceling the part of the shaft work that would have to be done to turn the shaft if the atmosphere didn’t have its own pressure to contribute. That’s the easy part. The hard part is that the other side of the piston is in contact with the tank, and the tank air now has to be pushed back into the tank so the piston can move.

So the tank air is acting as a spring. On the compression cylinder’s compression stroke—the out stroke—the tank air expands and does all the work of compression and then some. The extra work is stored in the flywheels. Then on the intake stroke of the compression cylinder, the flywheels carry the piston part of the way back in toward the tank, but the compression stroke on the tank end of the piston is the same amount of work as the expansion stroke had been, and the flywheels alone won’t do that much work. So the piston compresses atmosphere on the out stroke when it’s moving away from the tank, and compresses the tank air about ¾ of the way back into the tank (“loads the spring”) going back toward the tank on the in stroke.

Before the flywheel slows down too much, an air engine mounted on or near the tank takes over the task of getting the tank air back in the tank by turning the crankshaft the rest of the way to dead center. Once past dead center, the tank air—like a wound spring—is again allowed to unwind against the back of the piston and the cycle starts again. So the air engine is not working through the whole stroke, just about 1/8 of the time. The last ¼ of the in stroke is done by the air engine alone. Assuming it is an efficient air engine, the work could be done at constant pressure, during the first 25% of its stroke before cutoff, before the expansion portion of the stroke. Once past the dead center, expansion of the air already in the cylinder will continue to contribute to shaft work and is unneeded so will be stored in the flywheel of maybe it can be used to run the compressor faster.

The nice thing about the arrangement with the air engine is that it puts the strongest part of the air engine’s cycle—the first fourth of the power stroke when it is working at full pressure—to work when it is needed most. If you’ve ever thought about pushing a compressor cylinder directly with an expansion cylinder, the problem crops up that the pushing cylinder decreases in force while the compression cylinder increases in resistance, which is exactly the sort of thing that encourages most inventors to join the discouragement fraternity and claim that the whole idea is impossible. Makes ‘em look smarter if the whole engineering profession is sagely wobbling their noodles in unison with them, eh? But this design eliminates the problem by letting us use an efficient air engine without getting in trouble for it.

That’s all there is to it!

To summarize from the beginning:

The machine can be started externally, by any means including spinning the flywheel by hand through several revolutions. The way I see it, the machine will then run by itself and compress extra air that can be used to do external work. Because it takes in ambient air, it does have an external energy source. Here’s the way I see it: if it works, it’s solar power. If it doesn’t work, it’s perpetual motion delusion.

The cylinder’s compression stroke and the tank’s expansion stroke take place at the same time—the out stroke. The first part of the out stroke has pressure going up in the cylinder as the air is squeezed into a smaller volume. Then once the pressure is the same as tank pressure, the rest of the so-called compression stroke is really delivery at constant pressure into the tank.

Everything on the head end of the cylinder can be calculated with the normal air compressor formula since nothing unusual happens on that end. There is no mixing of tank air with anything, just intake of atmosphere, compression, and delivery into a tank.

But unlike the typical compressor, when the hot compressed air is delivered into the tank, it is going to mix with actively expanding COLD air and will instantly be cooled. The heat of compression should be automatically conserved. (I wonder if Lee Rogers heard about this design.) Then this cold tank air will be forced part of the way back into the tank where it came from by the energized flywheel. Very energized flywheel, as the expansion of tank air far exceeds what the cylinder needs to get its air compressed. The air motor turns the shaft the rest of the way home at full pressure and then works expansively through the rest of its stroke. Note the good use of the separation of components principle, with the air motor able to do its job where it is needed most. The gear ratio between the air motor shaft and the big crankshaft can be designed wherever it needs to be.

The reason this should work, vs. the equalization engine, is that the entry of large amounts of tank air into the equation is helping to turn the shaft! Compare the two, go ahead and do the math, it won’t make your brain bleed, it might make you a real superhero! I really like this new idea, it’s only 120 years old and the laws of physics were well established by the 1890s. I’m implying that the inventor, a professional machinist who always listed his occupation as “inventor”—and how many “inventors” can do that—knew the difference between wishful thinking in the realm of perpetual motion and a simple way of getting fresh energy tricked into an air tank.

This was patented. The patent office asked for and received a working model and then granted the patent!

The same inventor also built and patented an in-tank air compressor, which is the most obvious way to conserve compression heat, and he said the machine produced three times more power than it needed to operate. There were hundreds of witnesses, and he used to leave the machine running for days when he left home, with only big dogs guarding it. Whether he combined the two inventions I don’t know.

This same inventor later had the pleasure of carrying out a very lucrative land deal with an extremely wealthy businessmen’s organization from New York City that wanted to build an athletic club on the resort island where he lived. I wonder if that has anything to do with why his remarkable air compressors disappeared from the face of the earth?

Since the math is the bottom line, here is the bottom line. The head end of the cylinder works the same as any air compressor. The other end—the end that does most of the work—runs almost for free! Because when the spring unwinds it energizes a flywheel, so all but friction can be put back into the system by taking it back from the flywheel. By “free” I mean that the expansion of the tank air into the back end of the cylinder, and the recompression of the same air back into the tank, cancel each other out exactly. Not counting losses. Losses are few because the air doesn’t ever leave the system. The recompression constitutes very cold air being pushed back into a very cold tank, and all this cold absorbs the heat of compression so thermal losses should be small or even negligible.

Luther

PS. I don’t mean to be pushy about learning compressed air math, but I have discovered by experience that Santa Claus is not going to bring me an air car for Christmas, so if I want it to happen I have to make a place for it in my world by my own efforts. One of the best feelings I ever got was getting to the bottom of compressed air math. Not that I’ve mastered it, but I’ve seen it and know it’s real. The reason people won’t try it is that they think it’s not real; that they can’t possibly do it. The reason for this is that the textbooks are so poorly written. Start on page one of Compressed Air Power Secrets and don’t move on to the next word or next page until you get it. Then it’s easy-

-er.