Does Your Clothing and Vehicle Surface Influence the Mileage

Votes: 12
Views: 5586

Background and scope of invention
The invention deals with enhancement of mileage of bikes and cars by modifying the surface texture of the vehicle as well as the driver. We present two variants of jackets here:
•A jacket for cars for improving mileage.
•Jacket combo pack for driver and bike for improving bike mileage.

Issues
With today’s situation of degrading fossil fuel resources like gasoline and diesel, it becomes urgent to find methods to enhance mileage for vehicles. Although researchers are looking for alternative sources of vehicle fuel, until now none of these could overthrow the performance of internal combustion engines which run on fossil fuels. Thus using gasoline based engines is a necessary evil. This inspired us to propose a method that can significantly improve mileage of vehicles at minimum cost.

Expected outcomes:
• Increased mileage
• Efficient use of oil and natural gas
• Reduction of pollution

Design Methodology
The idea has been inspired from a very famous but strange question: “Why do golf balls have dimples?”. It is a proven fact that a golf ball with dimples can go farther than its smooth counterpart with the same shot power. The reason can be explained using principle of laminar and turbulent flows resulting in aerodynamic drag. Aerodynamics results in two types of drag: friction drag and pressure drag. Friction drag is negligible whereas pressures drag which results due to difference in pressure of two regions results in considerable loss of power. Due to dimples on the surface the air flow in in the vicinity of moving path changes from laminar to turbulent. Turbulent flow has more energy and the flow sticks to the surface of the ball for longer periods thus reducing the pressure gradient between leading and trailing surfaces. Power loss gets reduced. Figure 1 explains the phenomenon.

Product Design
The proposed product is a jacket with dimples for a biker and a jacket with dimples for bike or car with a strong adhesive which can be attached to the vehicle surface. Due to surface dimples pressure drag, the cause of power loss is reduced, hence mileage of the vehicle gets increased.

Our tests and results
A bike was tested with the biker wearing our jacket with the bike covered with dimpled jacket. Under normal conditions the mileage of bike was 45 Kilometer per liter and it increased to 49.5 Kilometer per liter with jacketed configuration under same test conditions. Figure 2 shows the prototype of our design.

Manufacturing
The design can be manufactured at common rubber and polymer processing centers as sophisticated design parameters and machines are not essential for designing the product. Overall it's all about scratching a surface.

Proposed design specs of final product
Jacket for cars with adhesive:
Material- Rubber.
Adhesive- Epoxy based
Layer Thickness- 1 centimeter
Estimated manufacturing cost- $10-$15 per piece (varies as per car configuration).

Jacket combo for bike:
Material- Rubber for bike jacket and soft rubber for biker
Adhesive for bike jacket- epoxy based
Thickness- 0.5 centimeters
Estimated manufacturing cost- $10 per piece.

Voting

Voting is closed!

  • ABOUT THE ENTRANT

  • Name:
    Soumen Mandal
  • Type of entry:
    team
    Team members:
    1. Anirudh Kumar- CSIR-CMERI.
    2. Shishir Kumar Singh- CSIR-CMERI.
    3. Sobhana Sampriti Rajpurohit- Vedanta Alumina.
    4. Sangeeta Mandal- Lovely Professional University.
  • Profession:
    Scientist
  • Number of times previously entering contest:
    never
  • Soumen's favorite design and analysis tools:
    Catia, COMSOL, ANSYS, Fluent, IE3D, HFSS
  • Soumen's hobbies and activities:
    Innovative Design
  • Soumen belongs to these online communities:
    Facebook, Linkedin
  • Soumen is inspired by:
    Whatever I innovate and design, there is always a chance to do better and modify it to bring perfection.
  • Software used for this entry:
    SolidWorks, Fluent, MS Paint
  • Patent status:
    none