But relatively new technology that utilizes compressed air and fire retardant foam is starting to prove it can be more effective in some instances.

John Finley, president and CEO of Finley Fire Equipment in McConnelsville, said compressed air foam systems (CAFS) have been around for about a decade but the technology is starting to gain popularity with area fire departments.

“For years, the concept has been to put the wet stuff on the red stuff … That’s what puts out fires,” he said. “And foam has been used for years to help with some fires. It has the ability to cool and really cool or smother a fire. When you add an air compressor to the mix, it greatly increases the foam, making for even greater cooling capacity.”

Also, the systems are capable of putting out a fire using 75 percent less water than traditional firefighting methods. That can mean less property damage and less fatigue for firefighters.

Because the technology is relatively new and expensive, only a handful of area fire departments have such systems. Warren, Salem, McConnelsville-Malta and Belpre volunteer fire departments have upgraded to CAFS systems in recent years, Finley said.

A CAFS system adds about $40,000 onto the price of a new fire pumper. Some late model trucks can be retro-fitted with the technology, but it can add to the cost, Finley said.

Officials with the Marietta Fire Department said they do not have such a system, but that it will likely be added as an option when it is time to replace a truck.

After a recent natural oil and gas fire near Caldwell that also involved massive explosions, Caldwell Volunteer Fire Chief Rick Starr said the situation would have been much worse if it had not been for assistance from Finley Fire Equipment and Malta-McConnelsville fire crews, who responded with a CAFS system and a fresh supply of foam.

In all, six fire departments and more than 50 firefighters responded to the March 26 fire.

Starr said traditional foam systems were being used to try to extinguish the large blaze and to keep the battery of storage tanks cool.

“One of the lines in there had been broken off or burnt off and product kept coming out of the line and the only thing we could do was try to keep everything as cool as possible,” he said.

“Once the CAFS system got there, it really smothered it.”

It brings up an interesting question – what is going on inside an airplane cabin when it is cruising at 33,000 feet? It turns out that passengers are flying in something that vaguely resembles a space capsule. Let’s take a look at how the space capsule works.

The first thing to understand is that people dressed in normal clothing definitely cannot survive at 33,000. This altitude is roughly the equivalent to standing at the summit of Mount Everest. If there were some way you could stick your arm out the window at 33,000 feet, the first thing you would notice is that it is incredibly cold – minus 40 degrees F or colder. The second problem is incredibly low air pressure. The pressure is so low that people would pass out very quickly from lack of oxygen. The air at that altitude and temperature is also extremely dry.

There’s carbon-fibre construction, hand-stitched leather breast and chrome finish. The concept was designed with nutty French speed addicts Les Triplettes de Bonneville in mind, hence the Utah location. But it’d do for any other surface, too.

The rider’s position is flat, so that it minimizes drag, helping the compressed air turbine make the most of the contents of those cylinders. And hope this concept becomes a road-going reality soon.

The energy generated when a car brakes could be stored as compressed air and used to save on fuel, according to researchers in Sweden.

Electric cars and electric hybrid cars already make use of brake energy to power a generator that charges the batteries. However, according to Per Tunestål, a researcher in Combustion Engines at Lund University in Sweden, air hybrids, or pneumatic hybrids as they are also known, would be much cheaper to manufacture.

“The technology is fully realistic. I was recently contacted by a vehicle manufacturer in India which wanted to start making air hybrids,” he says.

The technology is particularly attractive for jerky and slow driving, for example for buses in urban traffic.

“My simulations show that buses in cities could reduce their fuel consumption by 60%,” says Sasa Trajkovic, a doctoral student in Combustion Engines at Lund University who recently defended a thesis on the subject.

Trajkovic also calculated that 48% of the brake energy, which is compressed and saved in a small air tank connected to the engine, could be reused later. This means that the degree of reuse for air hybrids could match that of today’s electric hybrids. The engine does not require any expensive materials and is therefore cheap to manufacture. It also takes up much less space than an electric hybrid engine. The method works with petrol, natural gas and diesel.

The idea of air hybrids was initially hit upon by Ford in the 1990s, but the American car company quickly shelved the plans because it lacked the necessary technology to move forward with the project. Today, research on air hybrids is conducted at ETH in Switzerland, Orléans in France and Lund University in Sweden. One company that intends to invest in engines with air hybrid technology is the American Scuderi. However, their only results so far have been from simulations, not from experiments.

“This is the first time anyone has done experiments in an actual engine,” says Trajkovic. “The research so far has only been theoretical. In addition, we have used data that means we get credible driving cycle results, for example data from the driving patterns of buses in New York.”

The researchers in Lund hope that the next step will be to convert their research results from a single cylinder to a complete, multi-cylinder engine. They would thus be able to move the concept one step closer to a real vehicle.

Lego Compressed Air Engine