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Increase acceleration
Air power assisting acceleration
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I was wondering what you all thought of this idea:

Most people who do illegal match/drag racing will know that one of the big problems is getting the kind of power you need to be competative and keeping decent fuel economy when driving to work. If however you could take an absolutly stock car and place in it a system where the engine drives a compressor to compress air and then use the compressed air to accelerate the vehicle (varios ways of doing this, whichever you choose as most appropriate) you could have a car that returned decent MPG and had more serios acceleration on demand.

satan_in_a_suit, Nov 25 2003

Howstuf works: Turbochargers http://auto.howstuffworks.com/turbo.htm
[Rcomian, Oct 17 2004]


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       Isn't this widely known to exist, and as such, is not an original idea? MFD?
yamahito, Nov 25 2003
   

       Surely the best way to use this compressed air is to pump it back into the fuel injector, and hey - you've got a turbo (see link)
Rcomian, Nov 25 2003
   

       Nice thought, but there is an Efficiency issue. Compressing air is an extremely innefficient. Great when applied to a turbo or supercharged system. But the electric driven idea sounds a lil less far fetched. Personally i like the supercharged spooled turbo. Now that is acceleration.
WildWest, Nov 25 2003
   

       I think the idea is to use the power of the engine to compress the air before you need it, then feed it back into the system when you do. I have to bone this, only because of its intended use. If you can apply it to every-day cars, surely the performance advantage would be lost, as it could be applied to the high-performance ones as well.
Freefall, Nov 25 2003
   

       I heard something about a special go fast edition of the Ford F-150 which used the AC system to cool intake air, and give you an extra boost. This supposedly works for about 30 seconds. The idea is sort of along the same lines--they both use excess engine power to store power for better acceleration later.   

       I think a better idea might be a hybrid system with ultra-mega-uber-capacitors and an electric motor capable of sustaining short periods of abuse.
gabe, Dec 03 2003
   

       Just bolt a couple of surplus JATO units in the trunk. Voila, an illegal source of extreme acceleration that won't affect the economy when the vehicle is being driven normally.   

       But you might have to dig it out of a cliff face from time to time.
whlanteigne, Nov 03 2004
   

       yes, what your describing would be much better put to use by storing away electrons instead of air molecules (like gabe said). this is common place as it is how nearly all hybrid cars operate. if you have to store away an energy source, electric potential energy is the best candidate...the only disadvantage is that capacitors can be sort of big and bulkey if we are talking about storing this much energy. maybe there is a way around this..i dont know much about electronics. also, not all people that drag race do it illegaly FYI ;)   

       -boned-
auricom_mech, Aug 03 2006
   


 
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