Design of a Vehicle Driven by Compressed Air with Two Hydraulic Motors

Abstract

This study is to design a compressed air driven vehicle which used two highly efficient pneumatic motors with a planetary gear box. The concept of using a hydraulic motor to transform the energy of compressed air to mechanical energy makes the energy efficiency better. In addition to that a booster is used to recover the energy lost in exhale air. However, the single motor has long operating time for one cycle, this makes the speed of the motor output is not stable. Therefore, two motors to set up the system can help to stable the output speed. To combine the output of two motors, an epicyclical gear box is designed to mix mechanical energy from two motors to reduce the speed unstable. Finally, a vehicle was developed and tested.