Thanks Greg, very interesting -- now what about going the other way and powering the shafts and pumps with CO2 powered turbines?
I'd thought about it as an experiment, but there you run into several problems... lack of turbines appropriate for us (nearest is air tools but their pressure rating is far too low to really take advantage of the co2, you end up wasting a ton of the recoverable potential energy reducing the pressure to something the air tool can handle),poor throttle response relative to electric motors, condensate/water ingestion in sink/freezing co2 on blades, excessive cost to fabricate something custom, etc... Also consider the gearing... to run efficiently, that turbine is going to be spinning extremely fast (see the speeds that some of the micro gas turbines are running at) We'd probably have to somehow provide increased temperature co2 to the turbine or risk freezing co2 on the blades during the expansion (if the turbine was isentropic the inlet co2 temperature would need to be ~120C to keep the outlet temperatures above -40C. ambient down would freeze the co2 in the turbine if the outlet was p>
1.5 hrs to fill a 62cu.in. tank, straight from their website. The standard size HPA bottle suitable for RC combat is a 48cu.in. You do the math.
Hmmm. You need an air compressor to run that Shoebox air compressor......... Wonder if you could put a reguator on your co2 bottle to regulate it down to the 85 PSI the Shoebox requires and use CO2 to compress the air? Something tells me you would get a lot of loss of energy (the 3rd law of thermodynamics?). I guess, if you have a shop compressor handy, and need the HPA, this might be a handy toy for $650. Think I will stick wih CO2, myself, for both self-contained on-board systems and for single shot refillers. Might try out a portable onboard compressor sometime, though, in a big battleship. sounds particularly interesting with a brushless motor. Just my .02, ymmv. Cheers,
