Fuel efficiency
A dose of Clap

Putting dust in your engine sounds crazy. But it might not be

Science and technologyOct 6th 2005 edition

ALTHOUGH they need to fire their brand consultants, the inventors of Clap—an additive intended to improve the fuel-efficiency of car engines—seem to be on to something. By pulverising a mineral called serpentine into particles a millionth of a millimetre in diameter, they have come up with an additive which, they claim, can improve the fuel consumption of old car engines by as much as 10%. And, a millionth of a metre being a nanometre, they are also claiming that their product is an example of that much talked of, but little-seen field known as nanotechnology.

The Clap project began in 1979 at the presciently named Institute of Nanotechnology in Moscow. The idea was to produce not a fuel additive, but a lubricant additive. The institute's engineers, led by Fiodor Wischnjewsky, thought that adding a suitably fine powder to an old engine's oil would effect continuous running repairs by filling in tiny cracks and abrasions in the cylinders and pistons. These irregularities make combustion inefficient, which increases both fuel consumption and pollution.

This being first the Soviet Union and then Russia, nothing much happened until 2002 when Francesco Meneguzzo, an engineer at the Biometeorology Laboratory in Florence, got wind of the project. Then things started moving.

The Italians ditched the Russians' efforts to design copper, zinc, aluminium and silver nanopowders. These rendered the oil too fluid. Instead, they concentrated on serpentine, a substance rich in magnesium silicate which was found to cling efficiently to the internal surfaces of all common petrol and diesel engines.

The problem was how to crush this mineral into small enough particles on an industrial scale. Industrial grinding mills made of hardened steel cannot be used since they release heavy metals into the milled rock, replicating the problems of metallic nanopowders. To overcome this, the engineers came up with a two-stage process, the first stage of which goes back to the origins of grinding mills by employing actual millstones made of granite. The second stage is ultramodern, though. The particles of mineral-flour made by the millstones are blown into nanosmithereens by tiny electrical charges.

The result, which requires a half-gram dose to be squirted into a car's oil every 40,000km, will go on sale in December. Old cars may soon, therefore, be clapped out in more senses than one.

This article appeared in the Science and technology section of the print edition under the headline "A dose of Clap"

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