The following article has a bearing on the action of the Beta-atmosphere ========================================================== Oct 6th 2005 From The Economist print edition
A dose of Clap Putting dust in your engine sounds crazy. But it might not be. 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 (sic), 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 ========================================================== When I was researching the strength of clays and stabilized soils, preparation of the material entailed mixing in a sun and planet mixer of the type used in the food industry. Depending on the moisture content the material reached an equilibrium at a particular grading of lump sizes. As any gardener would expect, the average lump size decreased as the moisture content decreased. At the equilibrium grading point there are two processes taking place. The larger lumps are being broken up into smaller lumps and the smaller lumps are coalescing into larger lumps. Individual mineral grains therefor are travelling up and down the lump size in a similar manner to, say, the way that individual water or air molecules travel up and down the vortex spectrum. To my surprise a literature search showed that in any mixing grinding process a similar equilibrium grading is formed. For instance if you grind up marble eventually you reach as stage where the particles of marble are "cold welding" themselves together as fast as they are being broken up. I believe that in grinding up the serpentine mineral as described above the manufacturers must have reached such an equilibrium boundary at well above the nano-scale size and that is why they had to find some other method to take them on down to the nano-scale. Now we have met the action of sparks before and suggested that they generate Beta-atmosphere vacua in the form of Beta-atmosphere vortices. I believe that is how the serpentine minerals are being broken up into nano-sized particles. In effect the serpentine is falling apart because it is no longer being held together by ambient external Beta-atmosphere pressure. Assuming the above view is correct, I doubt if serpentine is essential to process. I would imagine that many other minerals would be as good or better. Cheers, Frank Grimer
