Fuel Saver Devices Don’t Work
You can bet more consumers than ever will be tempted to buy one of those miracle fuel savers. The price of oil is peaking after a GFC-induced hiatus, and that means car owners around the world are seeing their hip pockets impacted harder every time they fill up.
It sounds too good to be true – principally because it is. The crackpot claims made by the sellers of miracle fuel savers invariably fail to stack up. They fail basic engineering/scientific tests. Fuel saver devices are invariably a rip-off.
Catalysts: these are employed in chemistry labs (and in your car’s catalytic converter) to kick-start reluctant chemical reactions. Your catalytic converter uses small amounts of very expensive metals like platinum, rhodium and palladium to break down undesirable exhaust byproducts.
Unfortunately, however, the combustion going on in your engine won’t benefit from a catalyst. Reason? Simple – combustion isn’t a hard-to-start reaction. In fact it’s too easy. Higher octane fuels are designed to be more reluctant to burn, not more eager. And to get the improved performance/economy possible from a high octane fuel, the engine must be optimized for it – with more compression, etc.
Magnets: anyone who thinks a couple of magnets clamped on your fuel lines will boost fuel economy should have their driver’s licence shredded on principle. Magnets only significantly affect things that conduct electricity. Fuel doesn’t conduct electricity. Join the dots…
This notion of ‘alignment’ is ridiculous anyway. Although it’s possibly tempting to imagine little strings of octane molecules marching into your engine, looking something like the way they drew them on the blackboard in high school, petrol is a complete hodge-podge of carbon-chem misfits. It contains everything from butane (four carbons) to decane (10 carbons). If you look at just octane (eight carbons) there are 18 different ‘flavours’ of the stuff (called ‘isomers’ – different ways of joining the eight carbons and 18 hydrogens together) and each of them is a different shape – things like trimethylpentane, dimethylhexame and tetramethlybutane. There are 35 isomers of nonane and 75 different, misshapen, isomers of decane. Good luck lining them all up…
Third, anything that isn’t independently powered, which you stick into the engine’s inlet air plumbing will restrict the airflow. Restricting the airflow hurts performance and economy. Look at racing – one of the best ways to limit engine performance is to require all vehicles to fit a specific sized inlet air restrictor.
Lastly, even if vortex generators worked (and they don’t) and managed to increase swirl in the chamber, speeding up combustion, they’d also need to retard the ignition timing – otherwise the (faster) combustion would occur too early…
They’ve been quite successful at it, over the past decade or so, but their solutions have been expensive – requiring fundamental redesign of things like ancilliary drive systems, and a re-work of fundamental internal components to cut friction. Their counterparts in design are looking at every conceivable way to slash weight using better construction techniques and hi-tech materials. They are currently working on engines with not just variable valve timing but ‘total valve control’ as well as engines that transition from four-stroke operation at low speeds to two-stroke operation at high speeds. None of this R&D is cheap.
Each company, Toyota, Honda, the Volkswagen Group, etc., is in a massive race to bring this technology to market first, at the lowest possible cost. The car industry is tremendously competitive. Do you think they’d bother spending all that money developing things like total valve control if the next 20 per cent economy boost could be achieved just by getting last year’s engine, taping some magnets on the fuel line, whipping a catalyst into the fuel or fitting the fan from a kid’s toy into the inlet air plumbing? If you do, I’ve got some prime swamp land in the Florida everglades you might like to buy for the redevelopment potential.