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."

Comments

Fuel Efficiency of Honda

[William Robinson]

There has been wave of fuel efficient bikes in India after Honda introduced 'Hero Honda' bike with fuel efficiency as high as 60 Kmpl (142 miles per galon). Before that 2 wheelers had peak efficiency of 25-20 Kmpl (70mpg).

Vehicles with fuel efficiency as high as 100Kmpl (236 mpg) have been launched by some companies. I always wondered what made it possible and what technology they use.

This looks bona-fide

[golodh]

Although I am as skeptical as anyone about mysterious electric or magnetic devices attached to your fuel line, this looks bona fide.

For a number of reasons.

First of all the work is devoid of hype, mysterious "black boxes", is well-documented, links to established physics known since 1905 and 1959, and actually gives a credible explanation, verified in detail, of why we are seeing this improvement.

Secondly, prof. Tao's work spans at lest 2 years, witness this http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/sample.cgi/enfuem/2006/20/i05/pdf/ef060072x.pdf?sessid=2827 article, by the same prof. Tao, from 2006. In that publication, the authors properly relate their own work to much earlier theoretical work on viscosity (from 1905) that describes how viscosity of a fluid changes if you suspend a small amount of non-interacting spherical particles in it and later work (1959 by Krieger and Dougherty) on how much the viscosity changes. when you suspend a not-so-small amount of particles. The earlier work was backed up by experiments.

So up to that point we have the "thinning" effect on viscosity by suspending inert particles in a fluid, and it's solid physics to boot. Now what does this all have to do with magnetic or electric fields?

Well, it turns out that the thinning effect depends on the size of the particles you suspend in it. That's not so surprising either, and (again) experimentally verifiable.

Now here comes the trick: if you take a fluid that has large molecules in it that can be polarised by an electric or magnetic field that is strong enough to orient the particles despite the Brownian motion, you will see that short-distance order emerges in clusters of polarised molecules within the liquid. The net effect is as if you were seeding the liquid with particles. Now that's interesting. If you leave on the field for several minutes, the short-distance order extends a bit and you get fairly large ordered structures within your fluid, leading to an increase in viscosity. So there is an effect, but if you leave the field on for a long time it makes your liquid more viscous, not less. However, and this is the second trick, if you switch off the field soon enough, the molecules have enough time to become so polarised that short-distance order ensues, but not long-distance order. The net effect is that the "particles" (in reality small clusters of polarised and more-or-less ordered molecules) remain small. This effect is described in detail and the article describes tests that verified the effect. The level of detail coupled to the careful description of the underlying physics again make this claim credible.

And yes, with enough fiddling you seem to be able to tune your field strength and pulse duration so that you get an amount of polarised clusters that will measurably decrease the viscosity of your liquid. By about 9% or so. That seems pretty solid too.

Now about the applications. The first thing they though about was decreasing the viscosity of crude oil in pipelines. That will save a little energy if you're pumping lots of viscous oil through long cold pipelines. Nine percent isn't nothing, but it's not a great gain either. That was the state of affairs reported in Tao's 2006 paper.

The second application (Tao's 2009 paper) however is in internal combustion engines. As the article avers, lower viscosity leads to smaller droplets when fuels is injected. And smaller droplets seem to cause a cleaner and more efficient combustion. In fact, the authors report tests on a diesel engine by Cornaglia Iveco that showed a 5.5% efficiency improvement. Of course this result still has to be confirmed by independent tests, but its modest claims and well-publicised details make it thoroughly credible.

To produce the final results, the authors modified their device and claim to have obtained 20% efficiency improvement on a Mercedes-Benz diesel engine. The centerpiece