New Self-inflating Tires

Every car owner knows that to prolong the tread life of car tires it is necessary to keep them properly. This will also allow saving fuel and increasing driver’s safety.
However all drivers know how difficult may be to find a working air hose being far from your garage.
This problem inspired Coda Development, a Czech company, to invent new type of tires -   self-inflating tires. Such tires are not novelty for drivers as for many years they have been used on commersial and some passenger vehicles. But all of them used compressed air to keep the tires inflated.

Coda’s new invention is a peristatic pump built into the tire  which allows to maintain constant air pressure.  Usually peristaltic pumps are used in hospitals to to deliver drugs intravenously.  Basically it consists of a  spinning wheel pressed against a liquid-filled tube. The wheel is turning and pushing the content of a tube from one end into the other.
In cars the wheel of a vehicle is a wheel and the air-filled tire is the tube. A valve allows maintaining constant tire pressure.
The strong point of this invention is that a peristatic pumo is much simpler than a compressor-based system. That’s why it is more reliable. The other positive aspects are the light weight, low price and no power source required. Sounds like a smart idea, doesn’t it?
At  the 2008 SAE World Congress in Detroit in April coda is intending to represent its invention to the public. Let’s wait for the reaction of auto industry engineers.