Other place where it may be used are some industrial, narrow-gauge, or metro railways
-bulkyness: its easier to put large reservoir and turbine into ral engine than into automobile
-turbine being less responsive than piston engine also would have less negative effect when driving on tracks than for example city streets
Also LAES have advantage over "fossil heatng steam" everywhere where fire hazard or air quality would be problem, mostly in enclosed spaces, like mentioned metro or mine railways.
The main value proposition of LAES is that it is more energetically dense than contemporary rechargeable batteries.
This would suggest that someone will try to make a liquid air vehicle, probably powered by a variation of the Carnot cycle (that is to say, something powered by pistons), as someone did in OTL.
However, there are inherent limitations to liquid air as a working fluid:
1.- it depends on the surrounding environment to expand, which could make it less responsive in cold climates. In general, it would also "ignite"slower than fossil fuels.
2.- it's cold, meaning that it could only rise 200 °C in temperature from absorbing heat from the environment. This results in a smaller amount of work that can be extracted per cycle.
This makes me think that liquid air vehicles could serve a niche, and probably be preferred in some circumstances. But they won't fullfil the roles that fossil fuel vehicles have developed in OTL.
One would like to hope that Mr Tesla will do much better ITTL than he did OTL.
I don't know if Tesla would fare much different ITTL, because the field in which he was working was becoming increasingly complex and demanding of a theoretical framework that he didn't have.
Fascinating. I have a little bit of an idea of what the "Hygroscopic crisis" might entail, and why it might lead to the foreclosure of farms, especially in already dry areas. I'll hold back my full guesses here, at the risk of accidentally spoiling the future of the timeline, but if this is what I think it is, Solar tech might've been more of a mixed bag than I thought.
The name itself is an artifact of the very early stages of an event that would become much deeper and complex, but isn't environmental in nature. It's one of the few events that were written in advance, because it's a consequence of trends started ITTL that are beyond any individual actor or institution, and I see more or less as inevitable given the choices made and the habits formed since the POD.
It's one of the pivotal events of the 20th century, for good or ill.
As a side note, what might a small, relatively poor farm in the early 20th century need all that Liquid air for? Air-driven tractors? I can't imagine those devices are especially cheap to set up.
Bulkiness and minimizing heat transfer losses... although now that I see it, the design itself isn't optimized and has too much contact with the ground.
As for the bulkiness, the model in the photo has 25 m3 of storage, which has the energetic equivalency of 250 liters of gasoline. (Daily production shouldn't be able to fill so much, though).
Fascinating ‘fast forward’ there
@ScorchedLight - looking forward to reading all the details on how we get there.
Thanks. I used this as a modelling exercise in Blender, and texturing in Substance Painter. I've lost some practice with both softwares. I'll upload an image of the system itself later today.
The very use of the phrase as if there were other options and specifically mentioning that oil-burning trucks were rare and that military research was the thing keeping them trudging along seems to imply that EVs become the dominant form of vehicle quite early in this TL
I think that this would also be a possibility in OTL, had things gone a bit different. ICE vehicles outperform early electric ones, but in the turn of the century this wasn't crucial, and the infrastructure needed to take advantage of this performance wasn't there.
