Simple Device Claimed To Boost Fuel Efficiency By Up To 20% 674
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."
Two years ago it was magnets... (Score:5, Informative)
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...
Re:Taken for a ride (Score:2, Informative)
My wife's Merc (Ok, it's a Smart for 4) regularly gets over 50 to the gallon (petrol)
Diesel cars here (UK) can get over 60 to the gallon.
Why is 38 in a diesel considered special?
Re:Next stop, infomercial and/or MLM (Score:5, Informative)
>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.
Re:Awesome, doing it myself right now (Score:4, Informative)
Re:This is... (Score:1, Informative)
The electric field is a myth but ultrasound does the trick.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/m525p1x560025246/ [springerlink.com]
Re:Next stop, infomercial and/or MLM (Score:2, Informative)
And which car would that be? I notice you don't cite any name for it. Without citations, you can say anything and it could just as easily be completely false.
Citroen AX, Citroen VISA, Ford Escort 1.8 diesel, Ford Sierra 1.8 diesel, Vauxhall Cavalier, Vauxhall Astra, Vauxhall Nova, Peugeot 205 D...the list is endless outside of continental America. And yes, I'm taking into account we have a bigger "gallon" than you.
Re:Blind testing needed (Score:5, Informative)
Or they could oh I don't know, attach the wheel of the car to some kind of sensitive machine which would measure the power output of the engine under controlled and reproducible load, I think I will call this device a dynamometer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamometer
RTFA before you call something snake oil, the tests were done with laboratory measurements not with human drivers.
Re:Next stop, infomercial and/or MLM (Score:3, Informative)
also:
1992 Honda Civic HB VX 40/50 mpg
and the regular edition of the geo metro, also sold as the suzuki swift, chevy sprint, and pontiac firefly got 38/45 mpg.
Re:This is... (Score:5, Informative)
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 [acs.org]
Seems like you threw the baby out with the bathwater.
Re:Blind testing needed (Score:5, Informative)
The proper blind testing of course would be to install it in say ten cars, seven or eight where it actually works, and the other ones an identically looking device that is simply not functional.
Then either choose ten identical cars (as identical as possible), or first follow the drivers for say a month or two and record their fuel use without the device, and after that for some period of time with the device (or the placebo) installed, and check the differences.
It sounds bull to me that you can so easily change the viscosity of an apolar fluid with electricity. Most of the molecules in gasoline are nonpolar, and not even polarisable, so I doubt an electrical field has much influence if any at all on such a liquid.
Re:Taken for a ride (Score:3, Informative)
Fuel standards in Europe are higher than for the USA though (higher RON fuel).
You understand in the states our petrol octane number is measured based on RON+MON/2, as in an average of two standards.
87 octane US is like 91 or 92 RON.
Now you could be an insider telling us that Euro fuel is actually more refined, and American petrol uses a ton of additives to compensate for a less refined product. I have no clue if this is true or not, but if you're just going by the numbers, our numbers are lower.
Droplet size? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
This work was supported in part by RAND and STWA. (Score:1, Informative)
At the bottom --
====
Acknowledgment
This work was supported in part by RAND and STWA.
====
Well, we all know who RAND is. What is STWA?
Apparently it's "Save the World Air Inc". Oh and look at that they happen to sell a product that does *exactly* what this "research" paper is about.
Sad what's happened to academic research.
Re:Missing information (Score:3, Informative)
RTFA?
From the 2nd link (the ACS-published article)-
"A voltage is applied on the two meshes to produce an electric field of around 1.0 kV/mm between the two meshes. The device consumes very low electric power, lower than 0.1 W."
Also, the ACS article alludes to this being an "electrorheological" effect- ...question is, is diesel fuel (and, since the first article alludes to this being useful to other types of internal combustion engines, gasoline for that matter) an electrorheological fluid? Maybe, maybe not. I'm certainly not qualified enough to tell but I do agree this should be given proper scrutiny and experimentation by others.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrorheological_fluid
"Electrorheological (ER) fluids are suspensions of extremely fine non-conducting particles (up to 50 micrometres diameter) in an electrically insulating fluid. The apparent viscosity of these fluids changes reversibly by an order of up to 100,000 in response to an electric field. For example, a typical ER fluid can go from the consistency of a liquid to that of a gel, and back, with response times on the order of milliseconds. The effect is sometimes called the Winslow effect, after its discoverer the American inventor Willis Winslow, who obtained a US patent on the effect in 1947 [1] and wrote an article published in 1949 [2]."
In either case, the thought of applying 10kV (1kV/mm for 1cm) to each fuel line gives me the creeps. I know there's very little (if any) oxygen inside the fuel line to ignite it but if a leak were to start.... eek.
Re:Next stop, infomercial and/or MLM (Score:5, Informative)
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).
Re:This is... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:busted. (Score:1, Informative)
An electric field will do the same as a magnet as far as "reducing viscosity" in fuel goes. This is like seeing reflexology or something of that sort advertised on slashdot, it's pure idiocy.
Re:Taken for a ride (Score:3, Informative)
The absolute value isn't important. It's considered special because exactly the same vehicle with exactly the same engine was only doing 32mpg without this device.
Re:Knee-jerk /. (Score:1, Informative)
I'm not yelling snake oil, I'm going to calmly tell you why this is snake oil: the principles that are applied inappropriately, and the errors that are made in their claim, either out of ignorance or deceit or both.
First, electro- and magneto-rheology. The author cites an equation describing colloidal suspensions of particles in POLAR liquids, in which two oppositely charged layers (equipotential layers)of the polar species are formed around each suspended particle, giving the particles a net like-charge relative to each other, with the result that they repel each other and so cannot agglomerate. This charged layer arrangement can be stabilized by altering the pH of the polar liquid to force an excess of H+ or OH- to bias the outermost of the equipotential layers.
It is incorrect to apply the above principles to hydrocarbon mixtures. While petroleum fuels are mixtures of numerous different molecular weights, they are not colloidal suspensions; no mechanism or polar species exists to form the opposite charged layers around individual hydrocarbon chains.
Droplet formation: ...is a function of shear forces generated in the fluid at the point of the pressure drop(the injector orifice) and the surface energy of the fluid, not the viscosity. It requires energy to form new surface area in any material, solid or liquid. The more energy you supply to break something, the smaller pieces you get.
After droplets are formed at the orifice, they do not continue to divide, as this would require energy to increase the surface area from one droplet to two. What does happen is that they absorb heat via infrared and conduction, and evaporate.
Finer droplets and narrow size distribution do result in improved combustion, and this is particularly true of diesel engines, but again it has nothing to do with the viscosity of the fuel. In gas engines, the fuel evaporates prior to entering the combustion chamber. In diesels, the injection, and therefore evaporation takes place entirely within the combustion chamber and in a much shorter period of time, therefore achieving the finest mist from the injector gives the fuel a better "head start" in evaporation.
This is why Common rail Direct Injection, CDI (all injectors are supplied from a single high pressure fuel rail, not individual lines from a distributor pump, and the fuel is injected directly into the combustion chamber, instead of into a pre-combustion chamber as in traditional diesel engines) has been such a breakthrough in diesel engines. The injection pressures are extremely high, over 1500 bar, and electrically triggered injectors are used instead of the traditional hydraulic injectors. Apparently, the authors/inventors/salesmen are unaware of the CDI
technology pioneered by Daimler Benz and injection pressures well over 100 bar present in most diesel engines made today.
Re:Amazing. (Score:3, Informative)
What? The "magnetic permeability" of a non-magnetic substance?
Yes. Vacuum has a magnetic permeability. If it didn't, there could be no electromagnetic radiation (some would say that if its permeability were zero, the radiation would be infinite, as the Poynting vector is proportional to 1/permeability). Did you look at the link you provided?
Re:Easy way to massively improve fuel consumption (Score:3, Informative)
plenty of european and japanese cars already feature such a device.
Re:Blind testing needed (Score:5, Informative)
http://pubs.acs.org/about.html [acs.org]
This is the site for the publisher. So, since it's HAS been peer reviewed and published in a respectable journal, by your standards it's not snake oil but solid science. Go ahead and try to reproduce the results - that's why he published the paper.
Electrorheology is NEW. He doesn't charge the fluid, he used an electric field to reduce the viscosity.
Did you RTFA?
The Best way (Score:3, Informative)
Re:This is... (Score:5, Informative)
"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 [orbeng.com.au]
Re:This is... (Score:3, Informative)
Exactly! I've seen bad maintenance double up the consumption ... More precisely on my own car ... When the piston rings failed, and i had been knowing the day is coming when things fail ...
On old carburated cars aswell, their tuning is very important, but no one ever tunes them after they come out of the factory, therefore, overtime consumption increases as the cylinders gets looser, and crap piles up in the intake parts etc.
One often forgotten thing for fuel consumption is tire pressure, and width aswell. The rolling drag is way higher with wider tires, and with lower pressures.
But the stupidest thing is that most people could save up A LOT of gas by changing their driving style, yet, be where they need to be in time! Nothing beats human stupidity
Re:This is... (Score:2, Informative)
You can already buy one from VW/Audi.
Some weird numbers in their data (Score:4, Informative)
looking at the PDF of their paper reveals some weird stuff.
After a lot of blabbing they admit the viscosity change is only 10%. Looking at the curves for Diesel fuel viscosity, that's equivalent to heating the fuel another 10 degrees C.
In their "tests" they used an injector pressure of 200PSI. Typical cars use 2,000 PSI and some of the newer Diesels use up to 22,000 PSI! Makes you wonder why they used such a low pressure.
Their real-world test was with a Mercedes Benz diesel engine hooked up to a dynamometer, but apparently running AT IDLE. A fuel consumption of 500 grams per hour. A power output of 1/3 horsepower or so. Does not sound like typical engine operating conditions.
I would be very wary of this device given the bizarre test conditions.
Re:This is... (Score:4, Informative)
My mechanic doesn't recommend injector cleaning treatements. He says they are no longer needed, and as a partial proof he tells me that the outfits selling the treatments talk about incremental profit, add-on sales, and 'even your tire-changer could perform this service'. And he says his tire-changer is smarter than some of his ASE-certified techs, cause tires aren't as simple as you think. No discussion of the car makers endorsing these treatments. And 2) the car makers either don't endorse these treatments.
He describes these treatments as profit centers only. I've never had an injector problem in a car, though, so I have no reason to use them either.
ps- What is 'cheap gas'? Are there fly-by-night refineries out there producing inferior gas? Which ones? What brands or stores do we avoid?
whatever.
Re:This is... (Score:3, Informative)
And a patent is certainly not evidence that the invention actually works.
Re:This is... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Blind testing needed (Score:5, Informative)
For god's sake, I know this is Slashdot, and it's the cliche that nobody RTFA's. But I can't believe this prolonged discussion about how testing his device in a Mercedes was improper because he probably just changed his driving habits, and how they should install these in dozens of cars with placebos in a randomized, blind, controlled study, and then finally to your brilliant deduction here that they should just hire an independent lab to run it on a bench test as a properly controlled lab experiment. BECAUSE THAT"S EXACTLY WHAT THEY DID. Way to go, slashdot writers, your prolonged discussion on how they did everything wrong, and subsequently figuring what it is that they should have done, has finally arrived at the right answer for what they really should have done- the sort of testing they ACTUALLY DID PERFORM. From TFA:
The first engine test was conducted by Cornaglia Iveco, a diesel engine manufacturer in Italy (Figure 6a). The tests measured the fuel consumption rate and the power output at a constant rpm.
Constant RPM = lab work, not car driving. Read their testing methodology- a diesel engine on a lab bench hooked up to a dynamometer, measuring power vs. fuel consumption on the same motor with and without the device, performed by an independent testing lab.
On the Mercedes, they started with the car parked on a dynamometer in the lab and did lab testing, then they did six months of road testing to make sure their lab results were applicable in a real-world environment.
There are lots of highly-moderated posts above about how kooks and con-artists have been selling scam fuel-economy improvement devices for years, and how stupid the Slashdot editors are to have approved this story. Their argument boils down to saying that, because anyone has ever done anything invalid in the realm of engine efficiency, therefore any conceivable improvements in engine efficiency add-ons that anyone comes up with are invalid. This is a physics professor at a real university who published a peer-reviewed scientific paper in a respectable scientific journal, including results from an independent lab, and complete with specifications and testing methodology, because he expects other labs to duplicate and confirm his research. It's called snake-oil above, but that's the snake-oil he's selling that's being promoted by this? He's not selling anything yet, he's performing research and testing. He applied for a patent because he hopes to profit eventually. Once it's fully confirmed and proven.
Re:This is... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Easy way to massively improve fuel consumption (Score:2, Informative)
Define "prominent place" or it will cost car companies (and you, when you buy a car) a lot of time and money in court to figure that now. Then size, shape, and style (digital or analog, etc) will be a target of lawsuits. Consider the additional cost that now this gauge must be approved by car companies legal departments any time a change is made. Also, a "prominent place" require redesigning a perfectly good dash that they might not otherwise - most cost. Cars that are close to being produced would have to be delayed for a dash redesign. Oh, and sports cars that get 5-15mpg will have it too, regardless of whether or not the customer wants it or will pay attention to it. What about fuel cell cars that don't have injections cycles (afaik - i don't know much about fuel cells) or electric cars. You've also created another marginal increase to the barrier of entry into the car industry, discouraging new startups that might have better technology.
And your rational for all this? You THINK it MIGHT cause people to save fuel, even tho many new cars _already have_ this feature (tho it might not be in a "prominent" enough "place" for you). People like you (including politicians) don't care how many problems or how much money is wasted due to feel good laws that provide little if any net benefit to society.
It's thanks to reasoning like this that there are HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of pages of law that no one person can ever learn. Yet we're assumed to know them all by the court system. It may seem like a small thing, but when you have thousands of small "harmless" laws, it creates a great burden. Each year there are less and less things you can do without breaking the law. Doesn't that sadden you?
Re:Electric field isn't a myth (Score:3, Informative)
"Repeat the experiments and prove him wrong or shut the fuck up."
Easily done IF THE SPECIFICATIONS and PLANS of the device and power supply were included in the paper. Had they been available, it would appear to be a simple machine shop task to make the bits.
I have a better idea. You are so impressed, go buy one, become a distributor, and become wealthy as an example to us filthy skeptics.