LIQUID NITROGEN VEHICLE

SEMINAR REPORT

Submitted by

MOHAMMED ZAHEER
to

The Department Of Technical Education Government Of

Kerala In Partial Fulfillment Of The Requirements For The

Award Of

The Diploma in Automobile Engineering

DEPARTMENT OF AUTOMOBILE ENGINEERING

MAJLIS POLYTECHNIC COLLEGE PURAMANNUR P.O,
MALAPPURAM
OCTOBER 2022
 DEPARTMENT OF AUTOMOBIL ENGINEERING MAJLIS
POLYTECHNIC COLLEGE PURAMANNUR.P.O,
MALAPPURAM

CERTIFICATE

This is to certify that the SEMINAR REPORT entitled LOW PRESSURE THERMO
COMPRESSORS ENGINE submitted by MOHAMMED ZAHEER (20050218)to the Department of
Technical Education Government of Kerala towards partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
award of the Diploma in AUTOMOBILE Engineering is a bonafide record of the work carried out by
him under my supervision and guidance.

Guide: Mr. RASHID. K Mr. RAJIN .P

Lecturer Head of the department
Dept. of Automobile Engg. Dept. of Automobile Engg.
MAJLIS Polytechnic College MAJLIS Polytechnic College

Place:

Date: (Office seal)

Internal Examiner External Examiner

 SEMINAR – LIQUID NITROGEN VEHICLE | 2022

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I considered myself privileged to be able to express my gratitude and respect towards all
those who guided us through the completion of this Seminar.

In the beginning, I would like to thank MOHAMMAD SHAREEF. K P. Principal, MAJLIS

POLYTECHNIC COLLEGE Majlis Nagar, Puramannur (PO), Moorkanad, Valanchery,
Malappuram Dist, Kerala, for providing the congenial environment to work in.

I am grateful to Mr. Rajin.P, Head of the Department of Automobile Engineering, for giving me
the support and encouragement that was necessary for the completion of this Seminar.

I would like to thank Mr.Sooraj.VT, Lecturer, Seminar Coordinator, Department of Automobile

Engineering, for his guidance, encouragement and support.

I would like to thank Mr.Rashid. K, Lecturer, Seminar Coordinator, Department of Automobile

Engineering, for his guidance, encouragement and support.

I would like to thank Mr.Jabir Ali .P, Lecturer, Class Tutor, Department of Automobile
Engineering, for his guidance, encouragement and support.

Finally, I would like to thank God Almighty for all the blessing received during this endeavor. I
would like to thank my parents, my classmates, my teachers and all other people who helped me
in successfully completing this Seminar.

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ABSTRACT

A liquid nitrogen vehicle is powered by liquid nitrogen, which is stored in a tank.

raditional nitrogen engine design work by heating the liquid nitrogen in a heat exchanger,
extracting heat from the ambient air and using the resulting pressurized gas to operate a
piston or rotary motor

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CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT……………………...………………………..i

ABSTRACT ………………………………………………..……….ii

I.INTRODUCTION……………………………………………...…… 1

II.MAJOR PHYSICAL PROPERTIES OF LIQUID NITROGEN …………....….2

III.HOW DANGEROUS IS THE LIQUID NITROGEN EXPANSION …………...4

IV.LIQUID NITROGEN & CRYOGENIC HEAT ENGINE……........................5

V. NITROGEN POWERED CAR ………………………………………..6

VI. MAIN COMPONENTS OF THE ENGINE………………………………7

VII. PRINCIPLE OF OPERATION ………………………………………8

VIII. ANALYSIS OF COOLN2 CAR PERFORMANCE………………………9

IX. LN2000 ………………………………………………………...10

X. OPEN RANKINE CYCLE ………………………………………….11

XI. CLOSED BRAYTON CYCLE……………………………………....12

XII.ADVANTAGES OF LIQUID NITROGEN VEHICLES………….………..14

XIII. DISADVANTAGES OF LIQUID NITROGEN VEHICLES ……………...14

XIV. CONCLUSION ………………………………………………...15

XV.REFERENCE ……………………………………………....…...16

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CHAPTER-1

INTRODUCTION
A s the name itself suggests, a liquid nitrogen vehicle works on the basis of liquid nitrogen
contained in a storage tank. Generally the engine is designed in such a way that the liquid nitrogen
is heated in a heat exchanger, wherein ambient air is used to heat the medium which results in the
formation of pressurized gas which further actuates a piston or a rotary motor. The vehicles
operating on this principle has been demonstrated many a times in the past but never
commercialized. Recently in June 2016 trials had been carried in London on supermarket J
Sainsbury's fleet of food delivery automobile which implemented Dearman nitrogen engine
providing cooling for the food in cases when the vehicle used to being stationary positions.
Nowadays even second smaller diesel engines are used as an substitute. A typical heat engine
developed which employs a sub atmospheric temperature thermal reservoir such as liquid nitrogen
as a heat sink is said to be a "cryogenic heat engine". This concept of a cryogenic heat engine is
designed in order of developing non polluting automobiles. The way of bringing cryogenic heat
engines using liquid nitrogen as heat sink & atmospheric air as a heat source is studied here.
Transportations have increased drastically in these years in the urban areas leading to the emission
of greenhouse gases that heavily effect the air purity. Thereby in order to bring in an alternative
for it an efficient vehicle system has to be designed having zero emission, a lower tag price, an
efficiency that could be compared with that of the conventional automobiles, one that can be
charged or fueled quickly, etc. Only if all these major drawbacks are been engineered upon, it
results in customer satisfaction gaining popularity. Currently the only commercially available zero
emission vehicle (ZEV) meeting it's standards are the electrically recharged ones, however these
vehicles are also not a great success in the society due to its own limitations like initial cost, slow
recharge, speeds etc. Lead acid & Ni-Cd batteries are the past of major technologies in the electric
vehicles. They exhibit specific energy in the range of 30-40 Whr/kg. Lead- acid batteries take
hours to recharge & the major drawback of the batteries in all the cases is their replacement
periodically. This directly/indirectly increases the operating cost when studied carefully & thereby
not 100% acceptable. Recent studies make it clear that the vehicles using liquid nitrogen as their
means provide an excellent alternative before the battery driven ones. The ambient air warms &
vaporizes the liquid nitrogen generating compressed/pressurized air actuating the motor. Carlos A
Ordonez with his colleagues demonstrated the concept through a prototyped vehicle named
CooLN2Car (fig. is shown) at the University of North Texas, Denton.

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II. MAJOR PHYSICAL PROPERTIES OF LIQUID

NITROGEN

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III. HOW DANGEROUS IS THE LIQUID NITROGEN

EXPANSION?

Fig: Liquid N2 being transferred into Dewar Flask

The liquid to gas expansion ratio of nitrogen being 1:649 at 20o C i.e 68o F, a tremendous
amount of force is generated as it vaporizes rapidly in an enclosed space. The extent upto which
this can be dangerous can be well illustrated using an example from the past that happened in Jan
12 2006 at the Texas, A&M university. The pressure relief valve of a liquid nitrogen tank
malfunctioning & sealed later on. As a result of subsequent pressure buildup, the tank
catastrophically failed. The force of explosion was high as of immediately propelling the tank
through the ceiling right above it & shatter a concrete beam below it, blowing the walls of the
laboratory out of its foundation!.

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As a result of extremely low temperature & careless handling of the liquid nitrogen, objects
cooled by it may result in cold burns. Thereby special gloves should be used while handling it.
However a small splash will not burn the skin immediately as the evaporating gas thermally
insulates to some extent. Nitrogen is odorless, colourless, tasteless & may produce
asphyxia(deficient supply of oxygen to the body) without any sensation or an advance warning

IV. LIQUID NITROGEN & CRYOGENIC HEAT ENGINE

Liquid nitrogen is the cheapest, widely produced & most commonly used cryogenic liquid,
mass produced in air liquefaction plants. During the process, atmospheric air is passed through the
dust precipitator & pre-cooled using refrigeration techniques. Later on it is compressed inside large
turbo-pumps to about 100 atmospheric pressure. Once the air reaches 100 atmospheric pressure &
has been cooled to the room temperature it is allowed to expand rapidly through a nozzle into an
insulated chamber. By running of several cycles the temperate of chambers reaches low enough
temperatures & the air entering starts to liquefy Liquid nitrogen is separated by fractional
distillation & is stored inside well insulated Dewar flasks.

Liquid nitrogen is used in association with cryogenic heat engines. It is an engine that uses
very cold substances to produce useful energy. A unique feature of an cryogenic heat engine is
that it operates in an environment at the peak temperature of the power cycle, & thereby there is
always an heat input to the working fluid during the expansion process.

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V. NITROGEN POWERED CAR

When related to a nitrogen powered car (ZEV), heat from the atmosphere vaporizes liquid nitrogen
under pressure & produces compressed nitrogen gas. This compressed gas in turn runs a pneumatic
motor with nitrogen gas as exhaust.

Fig: Components involved in a N2 powered car

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Fig: Working path of the car engine (N2 fuel)

VI. MAIN COMPONENTS OF THE ENGINE

• A pressurized tank to store liquid nitrogen

• A heat exchanger that heats (using atmospheric heat) liquid nitrogen to form nitrogen
gas, then heats gas under pressure to near atmospheric temperature.
• A pneumatic motor (along with a Volkswagen transmission) that runs the car.

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VII. PRINCIPLE OF OPERATION

The principle of running the LN2000Car is similar to that of a steam engine, except for
the fact that there is no combustion process involved. Instead pressurized liquid nitrogen at –320o
F (- 196o C) is used and then vaporized in a heat exchanger by ambient air. This heat exchanger
is like the radiator of a car but instead of using air to cool water, it uses air to heat and boil liquid
nitrogen. The resulting high pressure nitrogen gas is fed to an engine that operates like a
reciprocating steam engine, converting pressure to mechanical power. The only exhaust is
nitrogen, which is major constituent of our atmosphere. The efficiency of LN2 car : It can travel
15 miles on a full (48 gallons) of liquid nitrogen going 20 MPH. Its maximum speed is about 35
MPH.

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VIII. ANALYSIS OF COOLN2 CAR PERFORMANCE

A single-cylinder reciprocating expander running on compressed nitrogen gas releasing
exhaust gas into the atmosphere was considered. As compressed gas was allowed to flow into the
expanders cylinder, isobaric work was done on the moving piston by the nitrogen gas.

The net isobaric expansion work done during a single cycle is gauge pressure of the gas
multiplied by the volume of the gas that flows into the cylinder.

The isobaric specific energy is given by,

Wi = (Ph-Pi)V= Ph(1-P-1 )V

Ph-Pi is the difference in absolute pressure between inlet and exhaust (outlet) gas.

If Pi is atmospheric pressure, Ph-Pi is the gauge pressure of compressed gas.

V is the volume occupied by the compressed gas / unit mass of gas.

P = Ph / Pi is inlet to exhaust pressure ratio.

The isobaric specific energy is given by,

Wi = RTh (1-P-1 ) /A.

Here Th refers to the temperature of the high pressure inlet gas.

The COOLN2Car which a converted 1973 Volkswagen and runs on liquid nitrogen is an
illustrative to the use of isobaric expansion equation.

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IX. LN2000

Fig: The LN2000

The vehicle works similar to that of a steam engine, except for using vaporized cold liquid
nitrogen instead of steam from boiling water. Vapour of the nitrogen actuates the air motor to
propel the car & then escapes out through the tail pipe. As the atmosphere consists of about 78%
of nitrogen, the environmental effects of driving LN2000 vehicles would be negligible virtually.
The heat exchanger of the vehicle pulls liquid nitrogen from an insulated fuel tank(cryogenic)
through a series of aluminium tubing coils & specially designed pipes. The heat exchanger is like
the radiator of the car, instead of using air to cool water, here the air is used to boil liquid nitrogen
to nitrogen gas for the further processings.

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X. OPEN RANKINE CYCLE

The processes considered are the expansion of nitrogen gas at 300K and 3.3 MPA to near
atmospheric pressure. Initially the process considered is isothermal expansion, i.e from 3.3 MPA
to 120KPA and the work can be calculated as,

W isothermal = rT ln (P2/P1)

r = 0.2968 (KJ/KgK) for nitrogen gas and T = 300K.

The result for Nitrogen is 291.59 KJ/Kg. Another limiting process is the simple adiabatic
expansion of the gas in which no heat is admitted during the expansion process. The work done is
calculated as,

W adiabatic = KrT [1-(P2 / P1) K-1/K] (k-1) Where

T = 300K and K = 1.4, the specific heat ratio for nitrogen.

The resulting Wadiabatic is 180KJ/Kg of Nitrogen exhausted at 150KPA

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XI. CLOSED BRAYTON CYCLE

Operation of liquid-nitrogen fueled, regenerative, closed Brayton cycle, cryogenic heat

engine is illustrated. Taking into consideration the adiabatic expander and compressor, the specific
energy provided by the system is given by,

W = egµ (eewe-wc/ec) ……………….(1)

Here, µ = AεL/Rt cold(pε -1)] ………….……(2) is the ratio of the working fluid mass flow rate
to the liquid nitrogen vaporization rate.

T cold is the temperature of the heat single.

P is the ratio of the absolute pressures on the high and low pressure sides.

L = liquid nitrogen’s latent heat of vaporization.

R = 8314 J/mol-K universal gas constant

ε = 1-1 /r ; r = working fluid’s ratio of specific heat capacities at constant pressure and constant
volume.

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The ideal specific energy provided by an adiabatic expander is

We =RThot (1-p-ε )/[A.ε] ……….(3)

That = temperature of heat source

The ideal work done by an adiabatic compressor per unit mass of gas is

Wc = RTcold (Pε -1)(A.ε) …..…(4)

By combining equations we get

W = egL [eep-ε (Thot / Tcold) - (1/ec)] ……..(5)

The equation (5) considers the energy available from using liquid nitrogen as a heat sink. The cold
nitrogen gas that is produced by vaporizing liquid nitrogen can be used a heat sink as well

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XII. ADVANTAGES OF LIQUID NITROGEN VEHICLES

• Being different from the electrically charged vehicles, ZEV use liquid nitrogen as an
energy source to instead of batteries as earlier mentioned. Some of its advantages over
the other vehicles are,
• Much like the electrically powered vehicles, the liquid nitrogen vehicles are ultimately
powered through electrical grid making it easier to focus on reducing.
• pollution from one source, as opposed to the millions of vehicles on road.
• Transportation of the fuel would not be required due to drawing power off the electrical
grid. This presents significant cost benefits. Pollution caused during fuel transportation
eliminated.
• Disposing/recycling of Liquid Nitrogen tanks can be done with lesser pollution than the
batteries.
• The tank can be refilled/refueled in a less interval time than the batteries can be recharged
with the refueling rates comparable to the liquid fuels.
• They are unconstrained by the degradation problems associated with the battery systems.
• It can work as a part of combined cycle power train in association with a petrol/diesel
engine, using the waste heat from one to run either of the turbo compound system
• Low maintenance costs.

XIII. DISADVANTAGES OF LIQUID NITROGEN VEHICLES

• The primary disadvantage of the system is the inefficient use of its main energy.
Energy from another is used to liquefy nitrogen, which in turn provides energy to run
the motor. We already know that any conversion of energy is associated with losses. In
liquid nitrogen cars, electrical energy is lost during the liquefaction process
• Liquid Nitrogen not being available in the public stations at appropriate locations also
poses a major concern. However liquid nitrogen can be abundantly obtained during the
liquid oxygen production, being it's by-product

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XIV. CONCLUSION

If more & more of such kinds of vehicles (ZEV) are put into use, the cleaner the air will becomes
marching the society towards an healthier environment, provided the liquefaction is driven by a
non polluting energy source such as solar, wind, tidal energy. In addition to the environmental
impact of these vehicles, refueling using current technology takes only a few minutes. As there is
always a scope of improvement in all the fields, the safety of the vehicle needs to be improved
from many points of view. Pressure relief valves need to be incorporated in all apparatus subjected
to cryogenic temperatures. Overpressurization may arise due to vaporization of nitrogen & the
danger it poses to the surrounding is already explained, making safety issues a major concern to
focus upon. More information regarding the safety concerns are given in various books on
cryogenics.

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REFERENCES
➢ Research paper on “Liquid Nitrogen as a Non-Polluting Vehicle Fuel” by Mitty C.
Plummer, Carlos A. Ordonez and Richard F. Reidy, university ofNorth Texas. The
University of Washington’s Liquid Nitrogen Propelled Automobile
➢ “Automotive Propulsion using Liquid Nitrogen”, Knowlen, C., Hertzberg, A., Mattick,
A.T AIAA 94-3349, 1994.
➢ “Quasi Iso-thermal Expansion Engines for Liquid Nitrogen Automotive Propulsion”,
Knowlen, C., Williams, J.,Mattick, A.T. Deparis, H., Hertzberg, A., SAE 972649, 1997
➢ www.washington.edu/alumni/columns/dec97/car1.html
➢ www.ilt.kharkov.ua/
➢ www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid nitrogen vehicle

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