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Simple Device Claimed To Boost Fuel Efficiency By Up To 20%
Ponca City, We love you writes "Temple University physics professor Rongjia Tao has developed a simple device that could dramatically improve fuel efficiency in automobiles by as much as 20 percent. The device, attached to the fuel line of a car's engine near the fuel injector, creates an electric field that thins fuel, reducing its viscosity so that smaller droplets are injected into the engine. Because combustion starts at the droplet surface, smaller droplets lead to cleaner and more efficient combustion. Six months of road testing in a diesel-powered Mercedes-Benz automobile showed an increase from 32 miles per gallon to 38 mpg, a 20 percent boost, and a 12-15 percent gain in city driving. 'We expect the device will have wide applications on all types of internal combustion engines, present ones and future ones,' Tao wrote in the study published in Energy & Fuels. 'This discovery promises to significantly improve fuel efficiency in all types of internal combustion engine powered vehicles and at the same time will have far-reaching effects in reducing pollution of our environment,' says Larry F. Lemanski, Senior Vice President for Research and Strategic Initiatives at Temple."
Snakeoil as has been evidenced with piles of other products that claim to do the same thing.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Sorry. This sounds way too much like "the tornado" and various other devices with magnets that you put around the fuel line. This stuff has been around for years, and it's pseudo-science. With pressure to meet CAFE standards, don't you think Detroit would have deployed such tech years ago if it really worked? Cue the Detroit-BigOil-AxisOfEvil conspiracy theorists in 3... 2... 1...
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I'm not a car person, but my impression is that if you go to Europe you'll find that off-the-shelf cars are a lot more fuel-efficient than off-the-shelf cars
in America.
They should be available in America but they are not.
Stephan
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
The device, attached to the fuel line of a car's engine near the fuel injector, creates an electric field that thins fuel, reducing its viscosity so that smaller droplets are injected into the engine.
Oh come on please stop it. This has been busted.
1. Snake oil.
2. Fuel injectors do a pretty good job atomizing fuel
3. Modern cars do not need another random electric field
4. Where is the double blind testing?
The way to demonstrate these things in a rigorous manner isn't to bolt them on a car and drive them around for a few months.
The way to do so is to bolt them into a test rig, where the engine can be placed under load in a precisely controlled manner, under identical conditions, as many times as required.
There are any number of universities (and, presumably, independent labs) which have such test rigs.
Until this device has been tested under such conditions, and given the extensive history of "fuel saving" devices which do no such thing, it's safe to assume this is snake oil.
That said, I gather Temple is a reputable university, and one does not get to be chair of Physics at such a university without a track record of quality research.
Either Prof. Tao is a genius who has done the seemingly impossible, the PR flack who did this press release has horribly misinterpreted the study and Prof. Tao, or Prof. Tao should start clearing out his desk forthwith for embarrassing the university.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Half the reason my new fuel efficient car gets better mileage is because it has a fuel efficiency measurement and I try to improve it. Result: I drive differently than I do in the other car.
The only way to see if these devices really work is to see if they improve efficiency when the people don't know they are there.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The problem I see with this device (and by extension any device or method used to improve gas-mileage in vehicles powered by fossil-fuels) is that it just serves to extend a technology that should've been abandoned decades ago.
Rather than solving the problem, i.e. our dependency on fossil-fuels, we are treating the symptoms of it.
This is just a band-aid. We're ignoring the fact that our vehicles need to be powered by something sustainable. This is where the research should be pointed - to alternate forms of energy for our cars. Not to prolong this addiction to gasoline.
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
60+ posts all yelling snake oil, all from people clearly with little or no engine experience.
While this may or may not be snake oil, the theory behind the gain is sound -- I don't know if people missed or don't understand that he's talking about diesel engines, not gasoline or understand that diesel is basically oil, its considerably more viscous than gasoline is.
Atomization of diesel has always been an issue with it. There's a reason the engines heat the fuel (the opposite of what you do with gasoline) before injecting into the engine -- it helps thin it down and helps atomization.
I can't say what a magnetic field may or may not do to it -- possibly nothing, perhaps something about the way he rigged it is simply heating the fuel.
Knee jerk reactions, however, from people who clearly don't understand how diesel engines work, is more useless than a snakeoil charlatan -- because real innovations can be lost.
Perfect example: I had someone tell me that a particular half in thick plate made of some sort of composite plastic that goes between a carburetor and intake manifold on a car was snake oil just like the "turbo twist" or whatever those metal fins sold to go in an engines intake.
The guy didn't understand how carbs work -- didn't understand how much heat a plate like that blocks from the fuel bowl in the carb, or how much the increased linear path through the carb helps to stabilize the atomization of fuel, making it burn more consistently. So he was calling snake oil on a part that, frankly, is a requirement on a carbed engine.
So everyone, be skeptical but holy crap, chill out. As yourself if your opinion is educated before you go assuming its correct.
Yes, the theory is plausible. That does not make it correct. For one thing, diesel engines are totally different in their fuel management from gasoline engines. What works on one is extremely unlikely to work on the other.
Second, reducing fuel surface tension is already very old news. Additives (detergents) already do this and hydrocarbon fuels already have very low surface tension compared to water.
While [plausible, the theory does not stand scutiny. Diesel fuel has very low dipole moments and is not affected by magnetic or electric fields. If it were, the tiny (micron) passages inside a modern CDI injector would ground/neutralize it anyways. This report is particularly bad since they do not record/report any decrease in exhaust temperature, a necessary sign of increased efficiency (work extraction from heat energy).
Your answer is thanks to an Australian inventor called Ralph Sarich . He designed a dual injection system for two stroke motors that reduces the size of the injected fuel droplets to thus improving combustion massively. Two stroke motors have a huge power to weight ratio but they are rather inefficient and produce allot of pollution. Ralph Sarich and his Orbital Engine company spent years and millions of dollars fixing this problem so now two stoke motors are not only very efficient (more so) but produce very low amount of pollution due to the incredible efficiency of the engine.
Want to massively improve fuel consumption nationwide? Make a fuel consumption meter mandatory in all cars. The display should show real-time consumption and average over the last fifty miles, in a prominent place.
I'm betting overall driving style would improve dramatically if people could see their consumption as they drive into the gas station forecourt.
No sig today...
I read both the blurb and the published journal article. One thing that impresses me is the clear language used to describe the work. Tao explains both the basic theory and testing method succinctly - even a no-math guy like me understood it clearly. He even accounts for the difference between the Iveco tests and the dynamometer results. The science is very clear. I had a lot of research methods training as an undergrad and I really can't poke any holes in the article. The best research reports are simple, short and narrow in scope; this paper is all 3.
The really exciting part is the simplicity of the method. Hell, you could probably build one of these things yourself. If it pans out, and it looks like it should, this is a big deal.
Go Temple Owls!! (disclosure: I'm an alum)
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
Don't know if it's a fraud or not, but there is an easy way to tell. If it comes incorporated into your new Honda, then it's for real. If they try to sell it to you as a DIY kit, it's a fraud. The car industry is competitive enough that it would kill for a 3% increase in MPG, let alone more than 10%.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
I've read the FA (briefly) and I'm not impressed. The graphs of the difference in size distribution show little difference. The Cornaglia Iveco tests apparently showed an improvement of "5.5%...with an error bar of 2%" which is far less than the 20% they claim and likely to be experimental error. The Mercedes-Benz test "was repeated for 3 h and had an error within 5% ...power output increased to 0.443 hp" which has too many digits, indicating a lack of awareness of accuracy. (Also, why imperial units, and did they mean "continued" rather than "repeated"?). The "continuous road tests" show no data or controls and are worthless, as others have pointed out. The very fact that they are mentioned is suspicious. In the discussion they talk about "our technology, developed on the new physics principle" without explaining what new physics is involved (and it's incorrect grammar). If this was peer reviewed, I would say they did a pretty sloppy job. If it's not peer-reviewed, it's worthless.
Phil McKerracher
I'm doubtful of this device too, but come on -- MythBusters is not a reliable scientific laboratory. Their pseudoscientific method seems to be:
"We heard that doing A can cause B. We tried doing something like A a couple times and didn't get B. Therefore nothing like A can cause B."
You can prove something is possible by doing it, but you can't prove something is impossible by not doing it. I can't run 100 meters in under 10 seconds, but that doesn't prove that another human with better knowledge and ability can't.
Electric field isn't a myth.
It works and is routinely used in research to feed mass-spectrometers with samples from liquid origin (the experiments are called LC-MS : liquid chromatography coupled to mass spectromety, the electric field device is called an ESI : electrospray ionisation).
What makes it a snake oil, is that ESI works on electrically chargeable subtrates, at the point where the liquid is vaporized, i.e.: it is done by the tip of the needle that vaporize and inject some sample, consisting (for exemple) of proton-charged peptides (= positively charged).
It just *CAN'T PHYSICALLY WORK* inside a fuel line were the fuel is both under pressure and liquid (no vaporizing there, it's the injectors which do vaporize) AND where the fuel is neutral (diesel is just fat/oil. No charges thus no electric field could have an effect on it)
Ultrasonication as you propose, is the only process which could have an effect on an electrically neutral fuel. But as said by other /.ers, it should be at done at the injector's level, not inside the fuel line.
Disclaimer : I work in Proteomics (where LC-MS on peptide is a very common analysis method).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Don't be a jerk. He knows that. In a science paper you are expected to round numbers to the accuracy of the measurement. Leaving the full precision is considered wrong, because it's misleading, pointless and just plain stupid. I learned this in high school, but many people don't learn it until college.
Disclaimer: I do *not* work at HP, Epson, etc, so the following is mostly from studying the behavior of fouled printers.
Also, not here to pick on one suggestion, just info for all.
I'm pretty sure the cleaning action for printer heads is still mechanical, ie: requires moving parts. It seems the printer makes the cartridges purge lots of ink onto a special pad that the heads then scrub themselves off against. The copious amount of ink involved depletes your reserves rapidly, and I'm pretty sure serves two purposes:
-an attempt to "blow out" any blockages initially, and
-provide sufficient ink solution to provide the suspension solvent as a cleansing (or at least loosening) agent for the scrubbin'.
oh, and...
-Make you buy more ink sooner.
Fuel doesn't have the problem of deliberately suspending lots of solids meant to dry into something durable, so that won't get encrusted on the end. Also, assuming the engine is in a fair state of tune and it's not "direct" injection (into the cylinder), the nozzle is just upstream of the valve, and there's not much chance of burn residue blowing back onto the nozzle. Blockages are more often the results of contamination that can't fit through the fine nozzle, but managed to slip past the more-flexible filter medium.
Diesels are of course a tad different.
Strong detergent additives, for temporary use only (they burn dirty) are the usual solution.
Although... I would be quite amused at a little micro-bot hanging out next to the nozzle like a window cleaner, occasionally shuttin' 'er down and giving the ol' gal a good scrubbin! It would look a bit like WALL*E, or the hover-bot that repaired the THX logo....
So that means you could have gotten better fuel economy with the same horsepower, right? I would have made that choice, personally.
That's exactly what it means. It's the same thing. You can have more power for the same amount of fuel, or the same amount of power and better economy. There is no choice to be made here.