1. Field
The invention is in the field of methods and apparatus for compressing gases, particularly flammable gases such as natural gas, but also other gases such as air.
2. State of the Art
In some countries, particularly New Zealand and Italy, natural gas is used on a large scale to power automobiles. Natural gas has been found to be a very safe fuel, actually safer than gasoline. Automobiles fueled in this manner have a pressure tank for holding the natural gas at pressures up to 2400 PSI. The compression equipment needed to supply natural gas at such high pressures has to be explosion proof and is very expensive. It is generally not economically feasible to utilize such compression equipment for less than a fleet of ten vehicles.
Currently, there is no widespread use of natural gas to fuel automobiles in the United States. The problems in moving to the use of natural gas for this purpose is that fueling facilities are expensive to construct on a commercial scale, and, without a sufficient number of automobiles using natural gas as fuel, are not economically justified. On the other hand, without fueling facilities, automobiles powered by natural gas are useless. In New Zealand, the push to natural gas as an automotive fuel is spurred by the government, which subsidizes construction of refueling stations.
Since many homes in the United States are supplied with natural gas, and automobiles can be made which will run on either gasoline or natural gas by merely turning a valve, and since natural gas tanks for use with automobiles have capacity sufficient for normal daily driving, there should be great demand for such an automobile if a homeowner could refuel at home. The automobile could be used for normal daily driving, and switched to gasoline for longer trips.