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HONDA AIR ENGINE
A series of photos of a Honda 500cc V-twin motorcycle engine that was converted to run on compressed air by a mechanical engineer and later used to run a cryogenic car on liquid nitrogen at a university campus. There is also an interview with the engineer who designed and built the engine and some details on the rotary valve he designed to make the conversion work.
MOTORCYCLE ENGINE CONVERSION DESCRIPTION:
go to DOWNLOAD.HTM and get the introduction to the book AIR ENGINES (ae intro.pdf).
The "For What it's Worth Compressed Air Math
Dept."
I have taken the liberty of posting the best of my attempts
to construct spreadsheets for doing compressed air, air engine, and air
car calculations. There are some things to keep in mind:
1) I am
not an engineer.
2) There is probably more than one mistake on almost
all of these spreadsheets. While I cannot guarantee that I have made
mistakes, I can't guarantee that I haven't. Consider these sheets a
starting place or a learning tool so you can develop your own system for
doing it better. If you use my calculations unquestioningly to
design an air car that runs backwards or blows up or runs out of air in
five minutes, don't say I didn't warn you.
3) Most of these sheets are
beginnings of a thought process that I couldn't finish either because my
brain got full, I discovered a problem that I didn't know how to fix in
the sheet, or I got away from the sheet too long and forgot what it was
trying to do or how it was trying to do it.
4) In spite of the above
disclaimers, I feel that you aren't going to find better information
anywhere. My calculations are from the textbooks and I have tried to
confirm results by comparing equations from one text to another.
This is not easy to do since engineers who write textbooks are not you or
me and they don't know how to say something to make obvious sense to you
or me. One book presents the same information as the next with few
exceptions, however the equations are given in different forms that must
be studied if you are going to understand them.
5) Compressed air math
is not easy, but it isn't rocket science either. The problem is
multi-faceted: first, you have the situation that pressure, volume, and
temperature all change simultaneously. Hydraulic math is much easier
because it is incompressible. Visualizing three things changing at
once is not easy, and the textbook writer who can make it all obvious on
the first read-through, and easy to retain once you've finally figured it
out, well I tried to be that textbook writer and failed. So not only
do you have a complex set of conditions (not like a nuclear power plant
but not easy), but no one has gone before me and laid it all out clearly
and concisely using the easiest math possible.
Let's hear it for the world's most famous air car inventor: Goofy! From October 31, 1937. The same time Bob Neal's patent was begrudgingly given him by the patent office which preferred not to.