Just wondering what people think, do magnetic fuel line magnets actually increase MPG or is it just a gimmick ?
Instead of buying fuel line magnets take your £5 or £10 notes, tear them up and flush them down the loo!!! Once upon a time people believed that seeing black cats on your wedding day was lucky … fuel line magnets falls into the same category!!!
If they worked they would be on every car leaving the production line by now, MPG figures are a massive selling point. Some success was gained during the second word war when very low grade fuel was having to be used but they were trying anything and everything. You would be better off using your money on new plug lead`s or just about any other service item you can think of.
Pity Popular Mechanics didn’t bother to do their research properly. Clamp on fuel line magnets are not the usual bipole magnet.The clamp on design means the magnet field is particularly intense, and that the magnetic fluxes collimate.Then they say gasoline isn’t magnetic; lets forget about the fact that a bunch of stuff makes up your liter of petrol. Its pretty commonly known than magnetic fields have specific effects on the viscosity of some fluids, including hydrocarbons. They’re bunch of idiots at Popular Mechanics; far from conducting the experiments with an open mind, they went in with preconceptions, and set up deeply flawed experiments.
Magnets are widely used in the oil industry to reduce the viscosity of crude oil. Lots of work has bee done, by groups with rather better setups than PM looking at magnets to reduce emissions.
A useful review:
http://web.anl.gov/PCS/acsfuel/preprint%20archive/Files/43_2_DALLAS_03-98_0216.pdf
http://www.fluxindia.com/images/maxiosb2_referemce.pdf
http://www.iosrjen.org/Papers/vol2_issue7%20%28part-1%29/E0272731.pdf
http://www.ekom.si/documents/LaboratoryforPolymerChemistryandTechnology.pdf
Of course, the eagle eyed might notice a lot of this work has been conducted in China, India and Eastern Europe; I think the reason is that much of the original work was done in the 1970s, in Soviet Russia, looking at aviation fuel, presumably to increase the range of their bombers. I know from experience that access to Soviet papers is very difficult, but some of the research they conducted back then was just amazing, because of the way they conducted scientific research (of course, they way they did things also meant they spent a lot of time on scientific dead ends).
Now, it might well be that the device PM used didn’t work; we’d never know due to poor experimental design (how do we know they fitted the thing correctly) but for them to use equally cod scientific rationale to explain their results…
All of these devices have a nugget of truth, a scientific rationale. The intake inserts; spiralmax etc, A design patented by GM for the Buick Regal Turbo, to improve performance and throttle response. It worked great. A generic version; not so. These devices don’t work, not because the underlying science is bad, but because the device itself is poorly designed. Now, thats not to say that somewhere out there there is a good design.
Good stuff AT. Also imagine a young fighter pilot whos seen several of his fellow pilots drop out of the sky due to bad fuel engine failure, hes not going to be too keen to risk similar. Then along comes the government bod with this new fangled wigget thats going to cure all that and away you go. Then the enemy pilots hear about this new found performance and are not keen to go up against the opposition so their top brass come up with bigger and betterer magnets and the tables are turned and so on and so on and so on. Some time later better fuel is now in regular use but the bods swear that the magnet wiggets did the trick with the low grade fuel but nobody wants to remove the wiggets just in case, sorry,this is the MX forum, forgive me. but you can see how the legend is born.
No waste of time and money just google fuel magnets.
Snake oil
Wikipedia’ed it, says on there it is a gimmick!
But they do cure rheumatism don’t they ?
If they really worked, every car manufacturer would have something like this in their fuel lines…
Back in the late 1990’s my boss was persuaded by a slick salesman to fit these things to the heating system boiler fuel lines. We were able to do fairly accurate back to back readings on the consumption…result…nada…nix…nothing saved