Low-Cost Compressed-Gas Power Source
by Dennis L Feucht
Those of us who have a fascination for technology, and are resourceful, look for novel uses for ordinary items. One common item of fascination is the party balloon. Although it challenges one’s creativity to try to think of product-grade uses for low-cost balloons, one possibility is that of a very low-cost compressed-gas energy storage device for powering low-power electronics, using air as the gas. Whether this is feasible requires some calculation, though largely not of an electronic kind. Creative engineers, however, are prone to versatility and readily reach for the languishing thermodynamics textbook on the shelf. If thermo is not your bailiwick, I’ll walk you through it. (By the way, thermodynamics is misnamed and should be called thermoquasistatics, the thermal science of low-frequency ac heat. The real thermodynamics is the study of heat transfer and rate processes.)
Think of thermodynamics as a kind of sequential logic, having states and processes that move the system between states.
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