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."
Fuel Efficiency of Honda (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [acs.org] 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
Re:This is... (Score:3, Interesting)
"NOTE: Copies of this study are available to working journalists and may be obtained by contacting Preston M. Moretz in Temple University's Office of News Communications at 215-204-4380 or pmoretz@temple.edu."
Why isn't the study available as a download? If it's true, there are plenty of skilled fabricators who can whip up a test mule and validate the assertions.
Re:Blind testing needed (Score:3, Interesting)
my pal and myself have tried a lot of different things to improve our gas usage.
any you are correct, knowledge of the product installed changes your driving behavior.
I was tested with a few blind studies and only 1 product seemed to help the others
were found to be snake oil. and the one product that did help, we learned that we
could port and polish the intake manifold to reproduce the improvement.
Blind studies were my friend would install or not install without telling me and
I would do the same to him. and we would drive for a month.
so yep, it seems to be mostly snake oil. Which I was hoping it would not be.
one product that we were very happy with was a water injector, that did help,
just a little bit, it installed right under the carburetor, kept the motor
slightly cooler and the mileage improved by 1 to 2 miles per gallon.
another product that we learned from was the simple spacer plate of 1/2 inch
this improved our performance on passing cars and did not improve ( or reduce )
our gas millage.
polishing and porting the intake manifold gave us about 2 miles to the gallon increase.
I don't know if these improvements would help anybody with a modern car, we tested this
with a 1968 GTO and my 1970 Chevelle.
onepoint
Re:This is... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
On my last trip to the USA I was amazed by how many cars drove past me with tires so flat that you could hear the difference in the road contact as they went past (not to mention the engines with audibly bad timings). For a nation so obsessed with cars, you don't seem to spend much effort maintaining them.
Re:busted. (Score:1, Interesting)
The reasoning behind the device does not appear to be sound, but not because of the episode you mentioned. They tested a magnetic device on a carburetor, not an electric field device on a fuel injector.
This article is an analysis of the effect of electric fields on the viscosity of liquids.
http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/langd5/2000/16/i03/abs/la990574l.html
As far as I can tell, there are few circumstances in which an electric field will decrease the apparent viscosity of a liquid. *That* is why this device is unlikely to work.
The article mentions that in some rare instances, a decrease in viscosity was achieved, but did not specifically mention common car fuels. If a viscosity decrease can be maintained inside the fuel injector, then the device has a chance of succeeding, but it seems unlikely from a device that operates beforehand.
Re:Easy way to massively improve fuel consumption (Score:4, Interesting)
>> I disagree. Those that drive like hell or drive gas guzzlers know full well their gas consumption habits.
Sure, people that drive aggressively on purpose will probably know that it uses more gas, but the vast majority of people drive "normally" and yet could easily improve their gas mileage by 10-30% by changing their driving style (coasting in gear, constant consumption hills, driving the speed limit, etc).
I recently rented a Camry hybrid for a road trip. 1100 km, mostly highway driving. For the first part, I drove normally,without paying attention to the fuel consumption and used about 6.8 L/100km.
Then I started paying attention and adjusting my driving style. By the end I'd brought my average down to 5.5L/100km, and over one 250km stretch where I was really paying attention, I used 5.2L/100km.
This car is rated at 34MPG (6.9L/100km) (highway) by the EPA 2008 measurements, and 38MPG by the 2007 standards. My normal driving was close to the 2008 measurements, and I was able to improve that by about 19%, and beat both official estimates of fuel mileage (42-45MPG).
Re:This is... (Score:3, Interesting)
It would seem reasonable that ultrasonic impulses in a fluid column would cause the fuel to pulse as it leaves the injector as a mist and result in smaller dropplets. It also should be easy to test if what seems reasonable, actually occurs in reality.
Re:Electromagnetism (Score:3, Interesting)
Uh... No, not really, electric fields and magnetic fields are related, but don't effect each other when static.
Also, this device appears to actually give a charge to the fuel, which is a completely different concept than exerting a field on it. Should work to improve efficiency if the cgarge imparted is significant. Of course, that might be an extra tenth of a mile per gallon, will have to wait for third party testing.
Improve MPG: The Factors Affecting Fuel Efficiency (Score:2, Interesting)