Design and fabrication of compressed air vehicle

Abstract

Increase in the energy consumption rate in this present day’s pose to cause a great number of hazards to man and his environment. With the aim of curbing this, researchers, engineers, scientist, and environmentalist around the world have taken great steps, but not all the steps have been applied to our physical environment. One of the least explored is compressed air powered vehicle, which can help in reducing a great deal of the hazards. Compressed air engines offer advantages of no pollution, light weight, reduced cost of maintenance and production over others engines using fossil fuels. The compressed air engine project involves modification of an internal combustion engine to operate on compressed air. A single cylinder four-stroke engine (Lifan 110 motorcycle) was selected alongside the designed frame considering design results. Air induction transmission systems were also designed. Several estimations of theoretical power were made along with estimated run time. The engine was fully assembled and incorporated into the frame. Although there were no measuring instruments within our capability to test for the flow rate giving the output power of the engine. The theoretical computations showed that efficiency of the engine running at a given pressure would be lower than that of engine running on fossil fuels. It was concluded that, while this type of engine may run on compressed air, it is likely that more powerful modified internal combustion engines would be more promising for accomplishing the project’s goal of an efficient compressed air engine.