Let's talk about alcohol

Does OP work in the corn or Ethanol refinery bidness?

z31maniac wrote: Does OP work in the corn or Ethanol refinery bidness?

Well I like to eat corn on the cob, does that count? My grandfather had a garden where he grew corn, and potato's and carrots etc.. To answer your question nope I just like what it does to motors and for so cheap!!!

One other benefit is the combustion chamber stays remarkably clean. In fact in a whole season of racing an Offenhauser sprint car on alcohol the chamber and valves all looked really fresh when we open it up to do a valve job..

alfadriver wrote:

frenchyd wrote:

Keith Tanner wrote: I can tell you that E85 makes the dyno room smell much nicer. And makes more powers on turbos in a big happy way. On older cars, you might want to grab a gallon of E85 and chuck representative samples of your fuel line in it to see how they survive. Also, keep in mind that it may be harder to cold start.

Good point about harder starting with E85, alcohol is harder to start. On the other hand we buy it up here in Minnesota and so far the truck has always started even on those sub zero (20 below) days. As far as older cars and rubber fuel hoses.. Well fuel hoses should be marked to use in fuel.. The mistake that often happens is people get rubber from the hardware store.. it's the right size and they think rubber is rubber!! Fuel hose should be made from Butyl not rubber!!! While they look and feel the same they aren't!

On that note, one modern thing REALLY helps- direct injection. E85 works SO well with DI, in my work. Starts much easier than on PFI.

Interesting, that might explain why I have had no real trouble starting my FR-S on an E85 tune at temps as low as 20°F. Idle is not incredibly smooth under those conditions, but then cold idle isn't that smooth on 93 either.

curtis73 wrote: I would look hard into the claims about more HP. It might be an anomaly with the Miata, but in general, ethanol produces about 20% less peak cylinder pressure. After all, its BTU content is considerably less than gasoline.

Peak cylinder pressure is what wrecks engines. (Ignore BTU content, it evens out once you compensate for the higher mass of fuel required for the available oxygen, HP limitation is almost always oxygen availability since we can easily add more fuel)

The lower peak pressure and longer average pressure mean you can run more boost/timing/lean and pick up power that way.

alfadriver wrote: Gasoline has basically 43 MJ/kg of fuel, and is evenly mixed at 14.6:1. So for 1 kg of air, there's about 2.94 MJ of energy in the fuel that is required to burn that air. Ethanol has 26.5 MJ/kg of fuel, and is evenly mixed in air at 9:1. Same 1kg of air, there will be about 2.94MJ of energy to burn in that air. (..) Where it gets really interesting is a peak power. While I can't vouch for the source, a Hot Rod article (http://www.hotrod.com/articles/ccrp-0611-e85-ethanol-fuel-test/) suggests that peak power enrichment for E85 is 6.9:1 and gas is 12.5:1. The gas part is where I'm also familiar with, so the E85 seems good.

Playing with E85 is why I'm trying to relearn "fuel" in terms of lambda instead of a ratio. Lambda is lambda no matter what fuel you're running, and eliminates confusion. (Recent thread on Another Forum showed someone was trying to run E85 at 10:1 under boost. Not "10:1 on a gasoline calibrated gauge" but 10:1 actual. Oops)

12.5 on a 14.6 stoich is .85-86 lambda. 6.9 on a 9:1 stoich is .76-77 lambda. (Or 11.1:1 on a gasoline calibrated gauge)

So, the E85 is being run significantly richer than the gasoline, but they were extracting more horsepower per BTU. Interesting.

It should be noted that those figures cannot be a hard and fast rule. I remember a "secrets coming out" thread on Yet Another Forum where someone's 300hp street ported 13B was running at 14.2 at max load (.97 lambda) for best power. It's not like you're going to melt a piston or an exhaust valve with a rotary, and they have a LOT of mixture motion and 50% longer combustion cycles than a piston engine has...

In reply to Knurled:

Either Lambda or Phi- which is 1/lambda.

Lambda follows a/f, so when we are all referenced that rich is lower, it works well.

Phi follows f/a, so it follows richer is more fuel. So the math is a little easier.

But 100% that we should be thinking in lambda or phi vs. air fuel- O2 sensor output, regardless of what it is or where it comes from, is in lambda or phi. If you see a/f numbers coming out of it, it's using an assumed fuel property. The actual sensor does not care or even come close to measuring it- all it does is measure the relative amount of O2 left in the exhaust- which is directly related to lambda or phi on a chemical balance.

Not that I don't love added power and all this, but my other thoughts about running E85 were that it was more carbon neutral. This was the initial argument behind government subsidies. Did this ever pan out?

In theory because the corn grew and got it's carbon from the air then the carbon you put back isn't affecting the environment as much.

In reply to Durty:

For corn, it's still under debate.

For cane, like Brazil, the math does work, other than cutting down the rail forests.

The hard part for the US is that corn gets subsidies, but other choices, which may be better, don't. So we may never know about southern grown cane, or northern grown sugar beets.

Kudzu is supposed to be a good feedstock for ethanol, and I heard it doesn't need much special to grow well.

We have corn because ADM, that's why. I've also heard that as much petrochemical is expended in making ethanol as the energy we get out of it.

(Personally, the conspiracy theorist in me says all of the "good" crude is gone/hard to find, and we need to shore it up with ever increasing amounts of ethanol...)

The reason we buy crude from other countries is that we have more than anyone and don't want to use it up.

Knurled wrote: Kudzu is supposed to be a good feedstock for ethanol, and I heard it doesn't need much special to grow well. We have corn because ADM, that's why. I've also heard that as much petrochemical is expended in making ethanol as the energy we get out of it. (Personally, the conspiracy theorist in me says all of the "good" crude is gone/hard to find, and we need to shore it up with ever increasing amounts of ethanol...)

I keep hearing the comment that we use as much or more Crude growing it/and converting it etc. as we gain from it.

While there may be some truth to that comment in certain circumstances. Ethanol sold in California for example. There is no truth to it in the corn belt. I used to sell/rent the equipment used to build ethanol plants here in Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin. Shipping costs were next to nothing, sometimes corn grew right outside the plants that converted it but the corn was never shipped very far.. Once made into ethanol it's pipelined to where it's used.

Yes corn that used to go into cattle feed is converted to Ethanol But I see farmers lined up outside of those plants to retrieve the waste byproduct of making that ethanol to be used as cattle/hog/chicken/etc. feed.

Many farmers use used cooking oil and such to fuel their tractors and harvesters.. If you drive in the country you can tell by the smell who is using crude and who is using used cooking oil etc..

Knurled wrote:

alfadriver wrote: Gasoline has basically 43 MJ/kg of fuel, and is evenly mixed at 14.6:1. So for 1 kg of air, there's about 2.94 MJ of energy in the fuel that is required to burn that air. Ethanol has 26.5 MJ/kg of fuel, and is evenly mixed in air at 9:1. Same 1kg of air, there will be about 2.94MJ of energy to burn in that air. (..) Where it gets really interesting is a peak power. While I can't vouch for the source, a Hot Rod article (http://www.hotrod.com/articles/ccrp-0611-e85-ethanol-fuel-test/) suggests that peak power enrichment for E85 is 6.9:1 and gas is 12.5:1. The gas part is where I'm also familiar with, so the E85 seems good.

Playing with E85 is why I'm trying to relearn "fuel" in terms of lambda instead of a ratio. Lambda is lambda no matter what fuel you're running, and eliminates confusion. (Recent thread on Another Forum showed someone was trying to run E85 at 10:1 under boost. Not "10:1 on a gasoline calibrated gauge" but 10:1 actual. Oops) 12.5 on a 14.6 stoich is .85-86 lambda. 6.9 on a 9:1 stoich is .76-77 lambda. (Or 11.1:1 on a gasoline calibrated gauge) So, the E85 is being run significantly richer than the gasoline, but they were extracting more horsepower per BTU. Interesting. It should be noted that those figures cannot be a hard and fast rule. I remember a "secrets coming out" thread on Yet Another Forum where someone's 300hp street ported 13B was running at 14.2 at max load (.97 lambda) for best power. It's not like you're going to melt a piston or an exhaust valve with a rotary, and they have a LOT of mixture motion and 50% longer combustion cycles than a piston engine has...

It's a lot harder Now days to figure out fuel mixture than when I first used it.. You could hear the pop-pop-popping of a too lean engine or feel the flat sluggy effect of too rich, So you'd pull a sparkplug and look deep into it to tell and switch jets out to adjust..

Now it's all instruments and data entry into a laptop..

In reply to frenchyd:

Harder? It's a lot faster and easier to have the car run, see the a/f ratio in the exhaust, tap a few keys, and it runs better.

Knurled wrote: Kudzu is supposed to be a good feedstock for ethanol, and I heard it doesn't need much special to grow well.

Damn... then Atlanta could be the ethanol capitol of the world. I remember massive lots of the stuff when I lived there over 30 years ago. I doubt things have improved. Hell, there are a couple of areas near me in SE PA that will be covered with kudzu in a few months.

Did you know that before 1934 we had no Kudzu in America the Japs brought it here at the Greatest Worlds Fair to help us with soil erosion.

frenchyd wrote:

Keith Tanner wrote: I can tell you that E85 makes the dyno room smell much nicer. And makes more powers on turbos in a big happy way. On older cars, you might want to grab a gallon of E85 and chuck representative samples of your fuel line in it to see how they survive. Also, keep in mind that it may be harder to cold start.

Good point about harder starting with E85, alcohol is harder to start. On the other hand we buy it up here in Minnesota and so far the truck has always started even on those sub zero (20 below) days. As far as older cars and rubber fuel hoses.. Well fuel hoses should be marked to use in fuel.. The mistake that often happens is people get rubber from the hardware store.. it's the right size and they think rubber is rubber!! Fuel hose should be made from Butyl not rubber!!! While they look and feel the same they aren't!

We've actually experimented with different types of fuel hose (from hose suppliers, not the hardware store), and they don't all react the same to ethanol. "Fuel" is not a clear enough identifier. You need a hose that is happy dealing with high ethanol levels.

One thing to keep in mind is that E85 is 85% ethanol MAXIMUM. The reason your truck isn't having as much trouble starting in winter is that it's probably closer to 70% ethanol in the winter E85 mix. This is also why you really need to have an ethanol sensor in the fuel line if you want to build a flex fuel turbo car - then you can dial in the fuel and ignition numbers to match the actual ethanol content running through the engine. If you're just drilling out the jets in your carb, well, be a bit conservative.

Keith Tanner wrote:

frenchyd wrote:

Keith Tanner wrote: I can tell you that E85 makes the dyno room smell much nicer. And makes more powers on turbos in a big happy way. On older cars, you might want to grab a gallon of E85 and chuck representative samples of your fuel line in it to see how they survive. Also, keep in mind that it may be harder to cold start.

Good point about harder starting with E85, alcohol is harder to start. On the other hand we buy it up here in Minnesota and so far the truck has always started even on those sub zero (20 below) days. As far as older cars and rubber fuel hoses.. Well fuel hoses should be marked to use in fuel.. The mistake that often happens is people get rubber from the hardware store.. it's the right size and they think rubber is rubber!! Fuel hose should be made from Butyl not rubber!!! While they look and feel the same they aren't!

We've actually experimented with different types of fuel hose (from hose suppliers, not the hardware store), and they don't all react the same to ethanol. "Fuel" is not a clear enough identifier. You need a hose that is happy dealing with high ethanol levels. One thing to keep in mind is that E85 is 85% ethanol MAXIMUM. The reason your truck isn't having as much trouble starting in winter is that it's probably closer to 70% ethanol in the winter E85 mix. This is also why you really need to have an ethanol sensor in the fuel line if you want to build a flex fuel turbo car - then you can dial in the fuel and ignition numbers to match the actual ethanol content running through the engine. If you're just drilling out the jets in your carb, well, be a bit conservative.

Great point you make about the need for an ethanol sensor to dial in the fuel and ignition numbers! b E85 can be all over the map with regard ethanol content. Yes it may have 85% ethanol but it might have 70% or 50%. Plus there is no octane numbers tied in with it! Even race fuel suppliers vary. I've seen numbers over 110 octane and down as low as 104 octane..

With regard starting, We push started the sprint cars that used alcohol but on those cool nights sometimes the push truck would have to push the sprint car for a half a lap or more before the sprint car would fire off clean enough to pull away.. On really chilly nights, it was fairly common to squirt gasoline into the injectors before sending them off. Now that alcohol wasn't ethanol but rather methanol.. Yes it wasn't unheard of to run as much as 5% Nitromethane in the fuel if the field was really competitive..

Does anyone know if Nitromethane will blend with ethanol the way it does with methanol?

alfadriver wrote: In reply to frenchyd: Harder? It's a lot faster and easier to have the car run, see the a/f ratio in the exhaust, tap a few keys, and it runs better.

A lifetime of drilling out jets and adjusting timing with a timing light and a wrench, so I tend towards that which I'm comfortable with. I watch others plug in their laptops and click on the keys but that's a world apart from what I'm comfortable with..

frenchyd wrote:

alfadriver wrote: In reply to frenchyd: Harder? It's a lot faster and easier to have the car run, see the a/f ratio in the exhaust, tap a few keys, and it runs better.

A lifetime of drilling out jets and adjusting timing with a timing light and a wrench, so I tend towards that which I'm comfortable with. I watch others plug in their laptops and click on the keys but that's a world apart from what I'm comfortable with..

I find the EFI stuff easier to figure out at first if you think of it in carb terms. Basically thinking of a power enrichment table as adjusting a power valve, an accel enrichment table as an accelerator pump, various regions of the timing tables are the mech and vacuum advance, etc.

The biggest thing that helps is having good data logging. Don't just watch the AFR while driving and guesstimate what needs changing. If you log AFR, throttle position, manifold pressure (or MAF data if you have a MAF), intake temp and coolant temp, it should be possible to point yourself to exactly where the settings need to be changed instead of having to guess and test.

In reply to frenchyd: When our modifides were running methanol, it was common to squirt gasoline in the intake for starting on a starter. The maintenance required and cost caused the decline of methanol usage. Besides, most didn't modify the engine to take advantage of it.

In reply to iceracer: I hate the dangers of methanol compared to ethanol.. There are darn few racers who haven't had complications of refueling with methanol. Now days I watch people handling methanol with rubber aprons, splash shields, arm length rubber gloves and special breathing apparatus. None of which was used back in the 1950's and 60's. Because of that I lot of the guys suffered from medical issues that could be traced back to the toxicity of methanol..

While ethanol can be abused it's at least as safe as gasoline.

As for the need for modifications to the engine, yes alcohol will really gain with either high compression or forced induction of turbo/supercharging. But when added to a stone stock engine if the fuel is enriched enough there are serious power gains to be had.. This magazine tested a Miata and ethanol gained 8 horsepower over 87 octane while methanol gained 15 horsepower..

frenchyd wrote: It's a lot harder Now days to figure out fuel mixture than when I first used it.. You could hear the pop-pop-popping of a too lean engine or feel the flat sluggy effect of too rich, So you'd pull a sparkplug and look deep into it to tell and switch jets out to adjust.. Now it's all instruments and data entry into a laptop..

It's always been instruments and data entry. It's just that the price of instrumentation has come down a lot, so we can use more/better instrumentation, and data entry is doing a quick data log instead of holding the engine at 4500rpm and noting water temp, oil pressure, EGT, ignition timing, and such with a pencil.

Some of the pre-WWII era engineering stories are a good read. Non destructive testing by using brittle lacquer on parts, running them on the dyno for whatever period of time, then pull it apart and see where the lacquer was cracking. Stuff like that.

frenchyd wrote:

z31maniac wrote: Does OP work in the corn or Ethanol refinery bidness?

Well I like to eat corn on the cob, does that count? My grandfather had a garden where he grew corn, and potato's and carrots etc.. To answer your question nope I just like what it does to motors and for so cheap!!! One other benefit is the combustion chamber stays remarkably clean. In fact in a whole season of racing an Offenhauser sprint car on alcohol the chamber and valves all looked really fresh when we open it up to do a valve job..

I bought a new Ford F150 V8 (4x4) with flex fuel.. The neat thing is I found out the use of E85 saved money. It cost me 10.6 cents per mile to use regular 87 octane fuel{paid$2.32 a gallon} but only 8.9 cents per mile to use E85!!{paid $1.79 a gallon}

I was hoping this was a thread about the 77% abv Bombay Sapphire that is being recalled from the market.

One thing alcohol can do is substantially reduce the required intercooler size for a given power output. It absorbs a lot of energy on evaporation, and it's resistant to detonation. The methanol-burning 1050 hp ChampCars weren't intercooled.