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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
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.
hilarious
This same "scientist" was promoting a magnetic device to do the same thing two years ago.
http://www.autobloggreen.com/2006/11/03/erin-brockovich-gets-your-attention-but-can-magnets-improve-fue/
Strange that we don't all have them bolted to our engines by now...
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?
I've got one of these and together with the fuel line magnets, electric turbocharger and hydrogen generator I have fitted I find the gas tank actually fills as I drive!
"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*
No you idiot, the car companies threatened to kill them if htye sold it when the last people came up with this inventionn! Magnets do some INCREDIBLE things with science and people's energy fields. But I don't care what you think; I know the truth! Ever since I started wearing my magnet wrist watch I haven't needed birth control!
So there, suck on that--ha HA!
OK, going to increase my mileage by doing it myself, I'll just hook up some battery cables to my fuel lines to charge the gas. Alrighty then, black lead to ground, other end to fuel line. Check. Red lead to positive terminal, check. Now, I'll complete the circuit, just let me affix the read lead to the fuel l
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
these "devices you attach to the fuel line" have been around being sold by con-artists for at least TEN YEARS
TFA says he's getting a patent. The US patent office wouldn't be so clueless as to issue a patent if there were prior art, now would it? ;o)
Just callin' it like I see it.
>With pressure to meet CAFE standards, don't you think Detroit would have deployed such tech years ago if it really worked?
You know, in the late 80s and early 90s you could buy a cheap non-hybrid car that got 40+ MPG easily. And today a hybrid Camry gets, what, 33 MPG?
It's not a coincidence. CAFE standards haven't been raised from 27.5MPG since 1990. (http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/CARS/rules/CAFE/overview.htm)
It wasn't till late last year that congress and the president passed a new law raising fleet efficiency goals to 35MPG by 2020.
So you're right, but just in the opposite direction. Now that Detroit has pressure on it to raise efficiency standards again, I expect to start seeing devices like this come out.
Long term option? Not at all. The oil in Alaska and offshore doesn't last forever. It is a mid term solution at best.
Snakes on the other hand can simply be bred, making snakeoil a renewable and CO2 neutral resource.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
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, except this one has a paper published, and lab tests on the fuel injector mist as well as a dynanometer and other tests.
http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/sample.cgi/enfuem/asap/abs/ef8004898.html
Seems like you threw the baby out with the bathwater.
Tired of legitimate data sources? Try UNCYCLOPEDIA
Give me a break. Sorry, the "big" car guys, GM, Toyota, Ford, Mercedes, et al know the physics of combustion very well.
I have been chasing the problem in my spare time for years. I remember an invention I had in high school auto-shop, in 1978 (I was an electronics nerd and gear head) of drilling hole in a distributor cap, fastening a mirror to the rotor and using opto-electronics to detect the rotation and fire a small coil for each spark plug. I was able to run the car without a high voltage distributor. I should have patented it, because cars more or less work like that now. Anyway, I digress.
"Droplet Size" has been handled quite effectively by increasing the fuel injector pressure in the newer cars.
You aren't going to come up with a solution those guys haven't thought about. The only thing you can do is come up with an invention that they are unable to sell. Look at something like Nitrous Oxide or some other oxidizer, now, if you beef up a four cylinder engine to take the increased torque and rework the carboration/fuel injection control so that it is a seamless boost, you could run a much bigger car on a much smaller engine. Most cars are very fuel efficient while running, but suck down gas on acceleration. The over all fuel economy is how much gas a vehicle needs to maintain its speed, and the amount of power required to do that is a fraction of the capability of the engine, but to get the acceleration you need, you need the extra displacement.
So, even though you may need a 5.2 liters of engine displacement for performance, you need far less for maintaining speed, so why not start small with a four cylinder, and use something like NOS to bridge the difference? That's what a turbo or a super charger does. By compressing the air into the intake system, you are making your 4 cylinders effectively larger by allowing them to take in more air and fuel. Turbos, however, have a bad but improving performance curve. They have nothing at the start, and "lag" performance over a bigger motor. NOS doesn't suffer that problem.
So, if you can find a cheap and plentiful and safe oxidizer gas and can make the boost clean, you'll be rich.
[...]devices that perform sexually acts on you,[...]
This is a bad example in your list, as they are nothing new.
They are still available these days, as they were in the 70s. Usually not for sale. Typical monikers for these devices that do not charge directly for their operations are "girlfriend", "boyfriend", "mistress", "husband" or "wife". If in need you can always try to rent them, this version is often called "prostitute" or "hooker", though in many countries sold under euphemisms as "escort" or "masseuse".
This post is not a recommendation of their use, particularly not while driving. While their use may have a bad effect on your fuel usage, the main concern is safety.
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).
Even as recently as 2002 you could buy a 44mpg highway Civic. No, not a hybrid - it was the "HX" model with lean-burn engine.
The carmakers are deliberately pushing hybrids because they are "sexy", but really any sufficiently small engine will get great economy. VW sold a gasoline Lupo that got 60mpg in Europe, a diesel version that got almost 90mpg, and soon will be releasing a 2-seater that gets 250 mpg (all highway numbers).
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Agreed! As a former mechanic, I can immediately call "Bullshit!"©.
At the station, we had a box in the back full of magnets, coil ballasts, additives, mothballs, and some strange gizmo even I couldn't figure out what they were trying to do. All crap. They were either pulled from customers' cars (to make them work again) or given to us to put on cars by sales drones.
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).
So, let's look at the fuel situation, shall we? Let's shall!
Fuel gets pumped up to the fuel rail(s), and into the injector(s), where it gets sprayed into the combustion chamber(s). {Note: The plurals take into account whether you've got TBI or MPFI.} You apparently attach this thing BEFORE it gets to the injector. Let that sink in for a moment - BEFORE the injector. Sure, the molecules are having their neutron polarity reversed (or whatever the hell they're claiming), but those molecules are now going to get crammed back together in the small amount of time it's waiting for the computer to tell the injector to fire. An eight cylinder engine has a longer time between firings than a four-banger, but compensating for amount of fuel capacity between the device and the injector, speed of engine, and amount of fuel being metered, this may be as long a a second or two. Remember the LA riots? The police would break up the crowd, only to have them reorganize somewhere else. Exact same effect. You're doing your thing before the injector, but after the processed fuel gets another block down the street, it's back to being an angry mob. And heaven help you if the car is Korean.
Now, if this device were to be incorporated into the injector's NOZZLE, they may have something. Or, maybe, just have the refineries put a big one on the output valve of their pipeline so we won't need to put small ones on each injector in every car on the planet.
banzai
Bullshit!© is a copyrighted title of Showtime! Networks.
Tornado® just sucks balls.
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
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!
"A finer mist *does* improve fuel economy."
Automakers could easily run a high-pressure second stage fuel pump/lines/injectors for finer atomization.
Designers are working on direct injection gasoline engines to blast the fuel into the combustion chamber, "diesel style", for even better combustion control than the common injector location upstream of the intake valve.
These retrofit with a cylinder head redesign, and are proven on ultralight aircraft engines among others:
http://www.orbeng.com.au/orbital/directinjection/dioverview.htm
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
People keep buying cheap gas
Really? Where?!
Haida Manga
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
When my printer manufacturer manages to provide automatic nozzle cleaning, I would think that car manufacturers would be able to do the same.
Your post proposes a
( ) mechanical (X) thermal ( ) gravitational (X) electrical (X) voodoo
approach to create infinite/cheap energy. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws.
( ) You made a math error
(X) You have made a faulty assumption
(X) You don't understand physics
( ) You keep saying "greater than unity"
(X) You're relying on self-reported data
(X) You're relying on an uncontrolled experiment
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X) Mechanical Friction
(X) Physical constants
( ) Laws of motion
(X) Laws of thermodynamics
( ) Asshats
( ) Gravity
(X) Turbulence
( ) Division by zero yielding undefined result
( ) Unit conversions
( ) Unavailability of infinately strong materials
( ) Unavailability of a perfect vacuum
( ) Solar heating
( ) Stuff that's lighter than air still having mass
( ) Translation losses
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
(X) Smarter people than you have tried to do this before
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
I am not a crackpot.
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...