Fuel Savings: April 2008 Archives
The head of Nissan was interviewed on CNBC in April, 2008 and he stated that hybrids are the best technology today, but the electric vehicle will be the standard by 2010.
I had a call from one of our readers, however, that pointed out that a new energy is hitting the market in 2008...compressed air. And it's not coming from the US or Japan, but those energetic engineers in India. Actually it was developed based on technology as old as the late 1800s, when compressed air was used in street cars and locomotives. By 1932, compressed air cars were cars were build using compressed air -- both 3-wheel and 4-wheel models. And in 1983, Terry Miller patented a car that ran on compressed air.
Compressed Air
This year, 2008, Tata Motors and Motor Development International (MDI) of Luxembourg have jointly developed the world's first commercially-viable prototype of a compressed air car, named OneCAT.Tata Motors is a multinational corporation headquartered in Mumbai, India. It is India's largest passenger automobile and commercial vehicle manufacturing company. Part of the Tata Group, it is one of the world's largest manufacturers of commercial vehicles. www.tata.com
MDI Air Car Designers of the car with a compressed air engine. Includes details of the technology and images of the car. theaircar.com
Zero Pollution Motors - Air Car
This is the expected performance of the revolutionary compressed air vehicle that Zero Pollution Motors (ZPM) is introducing to North America. zeropollutionmotors.us
More info at Wikipedia ... with a whole passel of "future automobiles" listed!
Further proof that the pioneering spirit is alive and well in The Last Frontier, the City of Unalaska’s Department of Public Utilities is the first off-grid* power plant in Alaska to install fuel saving technology that is expected to save over 100,000 gallons of diesel fuel emissions from entering the atmosphere this year. In addition to reduced emissions, the fuel consumption savings can be passed on to consumers through lower costs to generate electricity.“The more fuel prices rise, the greater the savings we will pass on to our customers by using this fuel saving technology,” said Dan Winters, the Director of public utilities at the City of Unalaska’s Department of Public Utilities. “We made a commitment to this community to operate our generators in the most cost efficient manner possible and in doing so, go green and stay green, and this is a great solution to help clean up the environment while simultaneously reducing our fuel consumption and costs.”
The fuel saving technology is called the Etorus FE, and it is changing the way diesel engine operators save on fuel consumption and costs, while reducing greenhouse gases and other harmful emissions. It is currently being used throughout the world to reduce fuel consumption and emissions in a number of applications, including fleet trucks, buses, locomotives, generators, boilers, furnaces, marine vessels and heavy off-road construction and mining equipment. For more information, visit http://www.etorus.com/how.html
“This technology is different from any other fuel saving device. It causes clustered fuel molecules to temporarily repel each other, resulting in a greater surface area that is exposed to oxygen at the point of combustion,” explains chemist Robert E. Yelin, Ph.D., an environmental management consultant and Etorus, Inc. advisory board member who helped develop the technology.
“Studies document how this technology causes some saturated aliphatics to release hydrogen gas and form unsaturated aromatics. The hydrogen gas that results from the formation of the unsaturated ‘double bonds’ complements the increased oxygen at the point of combustion, providing an additional combustion source to the fuel, which further aids in providing a more complete and efficient fuel burn.” The turbulence caused by the Etorus FE internally enhances these reactions, Dr. Yelin adds. For more information, visit http://www.etorus.com/tech_write_up.html
“Our initial response was that this was just another snake oil product, but when we further investigated, read the research results, and then checked the company’s references, we decided to try it,” said Jim Fitch, the City of Unalaska’s power plant supervisor. “We continually monitor our fuel consumption by employing advanced technology including flow meters, and after the first week, it had dropped by more than 5%, which is a huge savings when you use more than 2 million gallons of fuel every year. At today’s fuel prices, this translates to $0.20 per gallon in fuel savings for our city, which will amount to about $2 million over five years. We were so excited when we first saw the results that we kept checking every hour to see how much more fuel we had saved. Now after four months, we are consistently saving over 5% in fuel consumption and costs while reducing our emissions.”
For more information about the City of Unalaska, visit http://unalaska-ak.us
*Off-grid refers to self-sufficient utility power made available in urban areas by means other than reliance on large public utilities.
