Brad, you said: The other thing that you should be looking at,is the !now! 2 half full tanks of compressed gas can do the same amount of work as that of the one full tank of compressed gas--nothing is lost in the process,and so,work was done without loss of energy. IMHO I think herein lies the misconception. Two one liter tanks at 20 psi do not have the same energy as a full one liter tank at 40 psi because of the non-linear nature of the air spring. That a 40 psi tank bled down into another one liter tank leaves 20 psi in each shows that energy was actually lost in the process. The same goes for capacitors, properly transferring / sharing the energy from one capacitor to the other you wind up with more than half voltage in each, done wastefully and you wind up with around half the voltage. The energy formula for capacitors is 1/2 CV^2 and it is the square function that is the "gotcha'. The formula for air tanks probably follows a similar rule with a square function or fudge factor because of the non-linear nature of the air spring / container pair. You can feel this non-linear effect with a simple bicycle air pump if you close off the end of the hose. It gets progressively more difficult to compress the air in the cylinder. The first couple of inches are easy then it's like hitting a brick wall. Compressors work very hard trying to get that last little bit of pressure into a tank when topping it up to full pressure. If the air spring were linear, the compressor wouldn't care. Log the power input to a compressor as it charges a tank to get the full story. I think temperature of the gas must be considered to get a linear relationship. Of course I could be wrong about all this, just using my experience and tests as an indicator. regards edit: Boyle's original data graph attached p.s. I think where we need to look is the nature of the momentary temperature excursion when a gas is compressed.
« Last Edit: 2018-06-27, 17:55:59 by ion »
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