Agam Energy System Ltd. who specializes in 'energy wise' technological solutions, is developing a new generation of engines for the motor industry. Agam's car engine consumes a fifth of the petrol and emits a tenth of the CO2 fumes and pollution of a standard car.
While the motor industry is focused on a piston based engines, Agam's engine is based on a two phase (liquid- gas) turbine- like engine, with liquid ring compressor and turbine.
Previous attempts to create turbine based engines have failed, mainly because of the need to invest a significant amount of energy from the turbines to drive the compressors (and some other compressor issues). Agam solved this obstacle by creating a revolutionary liquid ring compressor with much higher mechanical efficiency. The performance of Agam's prototype compressor matches the theoretical computer model prediction.
When cold water spray is introduced in fine drops at diameter of 50 micron to the compressed air zone, the compressed air temperature will be at 80 C rather than 450 C as in conventional adiabatic compressors. This result reduces the need to invest a portion of the turbine energy to drive the compressor, since less energy is required to compress cold air.
In typical Adiabatic compressors, the air is heated during the compression. Agam's compressor is "quasi isothermal"- meaning it cools the air during the compression and enables compression with smaller amount of energy.
There are two important consequences to the introduction of Agam's compressor:- The compression of cold air saves about 35% of the shaft work.
- Efficiency of quasi isothermal compressor with mechanical efficiency of 80%. is equivalent to adiabatic compressor at an efficiency of 118%. Thus the power transmitted to the quasi isothermal compressor is smaller and more power remains to export shaft work to wheels.
This improvement enables Agam to offer a car engine with a 55% thermodynamic efficiency and 50% road efficiency.
The compressor, the turbine and the rotating radiator can store kinetic energy when the car stops. The energy can be recovered when the car start moving and brings the car to 70 km/hr when the ignition starts. This way the road efficiency will be close to the engine efficiency even in city driving.