New Report of 20% milage increase by reducing viscosity of fuel
 

I saw this first in Scientific American December 2008 page 42. so I looked up the original article in Energy & Fuels November 2008

Electrorheology Leads to Efficient Combustion

ACS Publications - Cookie absent

The typical laboratory test result of the Mercedes-Benz with a dynamometer is shown in Figure 7, At a fixed fuel consumption rate close to 500 g/h, the dynamometer measured the engine output. When the device was turned off, the average power output was 0.3677 hp. It increased to 0.4428 hp after the device was turned on. This indicates that the power output was improved by about 20.4% at the same fuel consumption rate. In other words, if the engine on the road is under the same condition as our laboratory test with the dynamometer, the fuel mileage will be increased by 20.4%. The laboratory test was repeated for 3 h and had an error within 5%.
figure

Figure 7. Laboratory test of Mercede-Benz 300D with a dynamometer. The average power output was originally about 0.368 hp and increased to 0.443 hp after the device was turned on.
A continuous road tests of the Mecedes-Benz 300D for 6 months showed that our device increased the fuel mileage significantly. On the highway, the device increased the fuel mileage from 32 miles per gallon (mpg) to 38 mpg. In city driving, the improvement of fuel mileage was not as good as that on the highway but was averaged at 12−15%.


Looks like another good starting place for better mileage :cool:

Are you sure that it says 500g/h? As in Gallons per Hour?

grams

wouldnt adding water just reduce the viscosity of the fuel, thereby improving mpg. not adding enough to mess anything up, of course.

Isn't fuel about 98% vaporized in conventional systems?

This story has come up here before. There are some fishy things about this guys research. First he claims
" A continuous road tests of the Mecedes-Benz 300D for 6
months showed that our device increased the fuel mileage
significantly. On the highway, the device increased the fuel
mileage from 32 miles per gallon (mpg) to 38 mpg. "

I have never met a 300D owner that has gotten close to 32mpg and I know a few. Also the funding for this research is coming from a company that was busted by the FTC for selling fuel line magnets.

I'll give it serious thought when its confirmed by an independent lab or the EPA.

in EFI, maybe not carbeureted systems?

plus the 300D is/was a diesel, with indirect injection if i'm not mistaken. maybe it wouldnt work on gas engines? though i'm skeptical of it anyway

Or maybe it won't work at all...

Decreasing the viscosity of fuel is great... it makes your pump work less, and it flows easier through the injectors. When it comes to the time to actually burn the fuel, the viscosity doesn't mean much when the system is already working to vaporize the fuel to such an efficient level.

Lets say, at best, that it was already 90% efficient at vaporization. Reducing the viscosity of the fuel to ANY extent could only make it a max of 10% better. The closer to 100% you get, the less effect your work has, meaning that it would take a fluid with NO viscosity to reach 99% vaporization efficiency, given the best possible circumstances.

I'm not saying 100% is impossible, but you're not going to get it by adding water to your diesel.

We skeptics have a champion :D

http://arrow.utias.utoronto.ca/~ogul...09comb_eff.pdf

Device violates the first law of thermodynamics.

I read that and laughed... now my wife is mad at you... she was sleeping.

Thanks for the paper though!

It must have some effect, or the paper would not have gotten into the Energy and Fuel publication. If you take time to read one of their publications you will see that it is a serious publication and not and advertisement in Popular Mechanics. try reading a issue.

This topic has already come up in two separate threads.

http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthrea...tion-5656.html

and

http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthrea...-c-p-6392.html

It may very well be a reputable journal, but 50% of its articles are below average quality :). This is definitely one of them.

The quality of the research is pretty poor, and the author is associated with a company (which funds the author) that is involved with some truly dubious products & marketing. See http://www.stwa.com/

I agree Energy and Fuels is a highly regarded scientific journal however, if you read the following link (which was also published in the same journal) you will see that it should not have made it into the publication.

http://arrow.utias.utoronto.ca/~ogul...09comb_eff.pdf

It did not meet the standards for being published there. This scientist raised questions about the efficacy of the test procedure and its lack of detail so that other scientists could confirm the results. This is a basic requirement of all serious scientific trade publications. Someone dropped the ball in the editors office.

This scientist also raised serious doubts about the claims being made in regard to the laws of thermodynamics.

If R. Tao, K. Huang, H. Tang, and D. Bell wish to address and clarify the questions raised they have the opportunity to do so. If they do they can have their rebuttal published in this journal provided it meets standards. This is how peer reviewed scientific journals work.

Thanks for posting that link, ConnClark. It'll be interesting to see if the original authors respond.

viscosity
 

On the surface it all sounds great.There is no mention of laboratory conditions nor road test environmental conditions,like temperature.Since viscosity is directly related to temperature,fuel temperature criteria would be beneficial to better appraising the research results.----------Had road -testing been accomplished during winter-into-spring-and summer,ambient temperatures, the impact to results would be remarkable.Perhaps all the data has been normalized for that.Don't know.-------- I believe that fuel is paramagnetic,so a magnetic field should not effect it,however,the presence of a high voltage potential( ie the high-voltage mesh grid) could certainly affect the fuel if even for for the short duration necessary before it makes it to the injectors.-------- Sounds plausible.

yes, it's true that fuel only burns as a vapor and that 98% or more of the fuel is vaporized and burnt in the engine, but just like with propane injection on a diesel working by making the fuel ignite faster and burn faster, increasing the downward pressure on the piston increases torque and the power to fuel used ratio improves because there is more flame and pressure at the top of the stroke, it would be good to know how warm/thin the fuel is as it passes through the injectors, but that is hard information to gather.

There are far more accurate and direct ways to test the viscosity of a fluid than measuring its flow through an injector or putting it in a vehicle and measuring fuel efficiency. If gas or diesel is an Electrorheological fluid why not test it using a direct and accurate method?

Probably because the data won't show an improvement and its easier to manipulate the results if there are far more variables that can't all be accounted for.

I cannot believe you guys even begin to believe this snake-oil claim.

I can't believe the efficiency at which we take them apart ... LOL

We have had some practice :thumbup: :D

0.3367 to 0.4428 HP? Seriously? Thats one heck of a dyno setup that can measure stable to this level. I work in a dyno lab, and no matter how stable your engine appears to be running you will get fluctuations in power output. Surely the standard deviation of engine output over the measuring period greatly exceeds the difference in power recorded with and without this device.

If this number is brake output as measured on the dyno, then engine power is NOT increased by 20%. The frictional losses of the engine surely amount to at least 10 HP on an engine like the 300D has.

I think about the only conclusion you could draw from this is that the engine power increased by 0.1 HP, not 20%. How much electrical energy does it take to power this thing anyway?

What a joke. On a side note I had to laugh loudly at the 110 mpg(e) Ford Mustang at the naias yesterday.

Was naias good this year? I haven't gone for several years now.

Frank, actually I was really pleased with the naias this year. Especially after last year, when even as all the signs of an impending crisis mounted, the big three had nothing but guzzlers. Huge turnaround for this year.

Listening to the spokespeople give demonstrations and hype the efficiency of new concepts was really nice. I work in the auto industry so I found it very reassuring as to the future of the big three. (Except for Chrysler!)

Also awesome was that I saw a lot less people stop to listen about any of the SUVs or trucks on display. (though folks did gush over the shelby mustang)

The funny thing is that Chrysler introduced EV's in the 80's... and for some reason, they're not willing to up the ante... or they can't.

What I'm enjoying is the apparent effect last summer's price spike had. Even though fuel prices have since dropped off a cliff, people are still seriously looking at smaller, more efficient vehicles, and they are especially looking at the newer technologies.

Interesting times, these. After the last "gas crisis" there was a terrible period during which cars got less powerful, more expensive, uglier, slower, and generally less fun. This time around promises to be much different.

That device in the research paper cites the reduction in viscosity for the increase in efficiency.

A much easier way to decrease viscosity of the fuel is to heat it up. The research sounds fake.

Bone: Heating fuel also reduces it's density, thus requiring more volume to obtain the same BTU output. This does greatly affect the scenario.

Ideally, you would change the viscosity of the fluid without changing it's density. (Adding water doesn't work for this reason, among others.)

Its easy to compensate for a change in fuel density. Just add more fuel. Diesels do this when they switch from summer diesel to winter diesel since winter diesel has a lower btu content per volume.

Actually in a diesel engine changing the fuel temperature causes a big change in the compressibility of the fuel. This affects timing which has a bigger effect than volume of fuel.

A good reference on this type of experiment can be found in NACA-TN-565 on NASA's NTRS server.

They did find an improvement in efficiency but it wasn't 20%. The biggest change was when the temperature exceeded the boiling point of the fuel at TDC. Thus the fuel instantly vaporized upon entering the cylinder.

I actually said that you could compensate for the density by adding fuel... this doesn't work on fuel injection systems though (including diesels, without human intervention)... they don't take fuel density into account. Most injection systems are designed to "assume" a specific density, and inject a pre-set amount of fuel based on "duration" and "pressure".

So - this is a case where you'd have to alter more than just one single parameter of your vehicle to keep things in sync. You can't just heat your fuel and expect to change nothing else, which makes it a moot point.

My dumb mechanical injection system has no idea what volume it is injecting. Also my cruise control (if it were working) would just add more fuel until the desired speed was reached. It is sensitive to the timing change due to the change in compressibility though.

A common rail injection system wouldn't suffer from the change in compressibility however and could compensate by just extending the duration of the injection pulse. This is what is done to deal with the change in btu content in winter diesel.

Note: the drop in lubricity of the fuel due to the temp increase and viscosity drop might accelerate wear of your injection system. but this is unrelated to the outcome in regards to fuel efficiency though.