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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."
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
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?
"Slashdot: Fake News for Idiots, selected by Moronic so-called-Editors"
FFS. This is (a) clearly bollocks (b) these "devices you attach to the fuel line" have been around being sold by con-artists for at least TEN YEARS. Actually, it must be longer as I remember them from when I was AT SCHOOL!
I'm afraid that whoever put THIS rubbish up is clearly an Epsilon Minus semi-moron.
*sigh*
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.
More safety features, higher power consumption, more powerful engines, heavier/bigger cars.
Adding in anti-lock brakes, airbags, large crumple zones, heated seats, air conditioning, cd players with built in satellite radio, devices that perform sexually acts on you, power steering, power windows, power adjustable seats, et cetera all increase total power consumption/weight of the car. Accidents have become safer, driving has become more comfortable, but the result is a car that weighs more and needs more power to get from point A to point B.
Largely, this is a result of demand: as consumers became aware of crash tests, safety features, et cetera, they were less likely to purchase (demand) cars that fail to provide adequate safety by modern standards.
It's not some conspiracy, it's simple physics: it takes less energy to move a smaller mass from one point to another.
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...
They did bust a magnet style device.
Anyway: If smaller fuel droplets help so much, I would assume engine engineers would have done this already by just adjusting the fuel injector with a different nozzle, much easier, much more trust worthy
A finer mist *does* improve fuel economy. That's why you should be having your car tuned up on a regular basis. Make sure the timing is accurate (if you have a car that doesn't have digital timing), make sure that the injectors are clean, etc. It makes a huge difference to fuel economy, and a parallel effect is better power/performance.
But that's the problem. Injectors are clean. People keep buying cheap gas, or driving their car too aggressively, and over time gunk builds up on the injector nozzles, affecting the misting ability, which hurts fuel economy. Engineers could design the best nozzle that's possible within the realm of physics, getting perfect misting, and if the owner doesn't take care of it then that gunk is still going to build up, and economy is still going to suffer over time.
Poor maintenance has a bigger effect on wasted fuel than bad driving and shitty design combined.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Now, we have this thing. I'm no physicist, at least one with a college degree, but I see one really big problem with this method. A bottleneck. Specifically, an injector. This is the exact same problem that is inherent in the design of the "Tornado"®. Sure, it'll spin the air into a neato vortex, but that vortex goes to hell (in a handbasket) once it tries to maneuver through the intake manifold, and you're right back to laminar flow. Well, it looked good on paper (and TV).
Well I'm a chemist and I have the degree to prove it. You are right and you are wrong. Just because the fluid moves past the point of disturbance doesn't mean that it automatically and immediately becomes laminar. There will be a period of time before the flow settles back down. The question becomes, is this "settling" time long enough for the fluid to make it past the injector and affect the droplet size? Well that's the million-dollar question and you can't say for sure until it is tested through experimentation.
In this case it IS possible to form polar molecules and ions through the use of magnetism and electric fields. It will also take a period of time before these changes will be reversed. The questions are will these changes affect droplet size and can the magnitude of these changes be great enough by the time the fluid makes it past the injector. Those, again, are the million-dollar questions. The only thing which will answer these questions is thorough testing. Unless you have personally done scientifically valid testing on these claims you can't say for sure one way or the other whether this device will work.
Yes, in the past there have been a lot of "snake oil" devices but that doesn't mean that every device is a scam. The possibility exists that some might actually make a difference. We just have to rely on validatable testing so we can decide what is a scam and what will work.
Sapere aude!
this really makes me question the reliability of slashdot... i would feel much better if i knew that they pulled it or updated it saying it was fake
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
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 ]
You must be new here.
Everyone knows the articles are crap... the discussion that follows is what makes this site worth visiting.
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...