Compressed Air Power Plant Idea

I read carefully. Believe you want to charge up a cylinder with compressed air using compressor powered off of the main network power lines, then switch over to generator powered off of the compressed air to provide power to house AND power compressor to top up compressed air in cylinder. Classic mistake of thinking you can get more power out than you put in. The system is not even close to being an efficient producer of power (even if we replace the compressed air stream pushing fan blades to turn an alternator). There are a lot more things going on in the individual electrical and mechanical processes than you currently realise (energy transfer and conversion inefficiencies, conservation of energy and laws of thermodynamics, etc). This is one reason why we don't have electric motors with alternators attached which will power themselves once they are running. In the end it acts as one big fancy load.

To quote Monster Garage (a popular engineering program over here), "that aint gona work".

A little more research on your part into some of the individual components of your system will show why this is the case.

There is nothing to be carefull about your idea.

there is no perpetual machine in this world. which can run itself as well as provide energy for your need.

This is conventional mistake.

you need energy to compress air. and then so many effiency losses. its better you directly use generator.

energy neighter can be created nor can be distroyed.

You can not use a quantum of energy twice.

energy used once is gone out of your hand.

there is no free lunch.

Make sure you hv a failiure insurance for your project.

It might be workable; if we are in a different universe...

This can never be energy efficient but there is a slim and I do mean slim chance that it might be economic. The only way you could ever get this to be viable was to use it to store energy while there was a surplus from power stations then re-generate the electricity during peak demand periods. Even so I just cant see it working you are going to loose about 20% through the motor in the compressor and another 20% at the generator end so you are down by 40% before taking into account losses due to cooling of the compressed air and the efficiency of the compressor and fans.

On second thoughts just forget it all together it just wont work.

Masu

this guy is not talking about the storing energy and then using it at the time of need.

What he is talking about is

he will run a compressure with a gtenerator store sufficient air.

this air will be used to run a turbine and will produce electrictity. and the air used during process will go bak in cylender and will keep on runing turbine.

he dont know how he will resend air in compressure. it need equal amount of energy

I realized that that' I just thought it was worth adding a further idea but as I said on second thoughts forget it, it just wont work.

i give you an ida to work most of people who loves to work and create new idas thay haven't thnik that it may works or not workbale,try to create new things, If you knows neumatic controlling & circuit designing in eumatic, you can say its will be future working plants. Think about taht & create first small size, than goes on bigger size.

Take the money for the "power plant" and invest it in an Engineering education.

At least you are thinking...now we just have to straighten out those thoughts.

Research: Compressed Air Energy Storage (a type of power plant)

New ideas are fine but if they don't comply with the fundamental laws of physics like the conservation of energy they just won't work. Engineering is about understanding these laws and applying them in a conceptual way to calculate what will happen in advance. The idea is that you don't need to build a small version to test your ideas but rather you can work it out on paper.

That being said if you work your idea out on paper you will find that you require more energy to compress the air than you get back when you use the compressed air to generate electricity. It's the most basic and fundamental of all physics that you can neither create nor destroy energy.

Masu

No doubt this idea is aboslute failiure.

but I think the world moves ahead by both the things

1 great Ideas

2 the desire to make new things.(Which converted later in great ideas if it works)

And one thing is we should admire is that this fello has enough currage to work on new things.

Today he may mistaken but who know 2moro.

You are of course correct. Many a hair brained idea has given us new technology. Look at the telephone, one English politician said that they would never need them because they had plenty of messenger boys. A classic example of not understanding the problem or the potential of the solution.

My point was however not against having an ideas but rather being able to sort the bad ones from the good ones by using science to analyze the idea to see if it will work without actually building it.

That's what's engineering is all about, building a mathematical model of the problem in hand and using that model to develop the solution.

Reminds me of myself about 30 years ago.

I thought that I could use a bank of lights closely coupled to a bank of solar cells. The solar cells would convert the light to electricity which would be used to keep the lights illuminated. The excess electricity would be used to provide power to my future house.

That was before I found that solar cells were not 100% efficient, that the current from the solar cells would not be enough to provide power for the lights (much less for my future home), and the fact that even if I could somehow make it work, if a light burns out, my electricity would decrease and reduce the light levels, causing the output of the solar cells to drop even more.

Habib, if you could, I'd like you to try out your idea on a small (very small) scale. I think it would be a great learning experience. I'm one with the others in saying that it won't work but, hey, maybe you might discover something. It may be entirely something else (unrelated to your idea) but a number of great inventions have been accidental anyway.

Have fun!

You should have kept going with your idea and patented it. You would have mad a fortune because what you ended up with is an opto-isolator. Just imagine getting ten cents in royalties for every opto-isolator in the world.

hi Guys,

I love to see your comments on this, Now i'm going to built this as a project with engineerig final year students, They' ve want to achive more, may be it will built with in 3 moth or more.

But we are going to create it, I need your moral support.

Thanks to all of you

What are you trying to teach the engineers, it's not going to be a very efficient plant? My guess is that you would lose about 25% at the compressors and about the same at the other end. Then there would be the thermal loss in the receiver which would depend on how long the air stays in the receiver. So at a rough guess I would say the efficiency would be between 50% and 55% all up. It would however be interesting to see the actual efficiency If you do build it I would like to know the result and see how close I came so pleas it here.

Moral support is always there but its not going to work if you work on wrong idea.

Can you explain how you are going to resnnd the air back in to compressure after using it for turbine.

dont u think it need equal or more energy?

Do not use compressed air for anything unless all other modes of power generation and distribution are ruled out. Only use compressed air when nothing else is suitable.

But dont stop thinking.

Here is efficiency calculation for your plant.

lets say you take 2 KW motor that have the efficiency of 85%.

so output at compressur input = 1700watts

lets say efficiency of compressure is 60% (this is for good quality compressure)

so out put of comp= 1020watt.

now you will run turbine with efficiency of 80%

output available from turbine is 816 watt

now you will run an alternator with the efficiency of 90%

so out put of alternator = 734 watt

so this is the max wattage avalbale from your power plant.

now lets say you consume 50% of this to run your normal load and 50% bak to your comp motor.

so the input availbale for your comp motor is 364 watt

Now my question is this that how this 364 watt output will run your 2kw motor that is fixed on compressure.

Not only this if you run it sum how your out put will be decaying.

so how how r u going to solve your decaying output problem

..looks like compressed air is hot topic these days, there are so many threads on variations of this medium. As far as this particular thread goes, i.e.: power generation and compressed - best priest for the above marriage would be CAES! and nothing else;

1. store off-peak production

2. isolate active chemical constituents, i.e.: oxygen, nitrogen

3. once (2) is done, it gives you ticket to burn a variety of fuel types efficiently - coupled to external heat exchanger -.

4. makes for a real compact system.

5. thermal loss to environment is minimal, if any.