My understanding is that ethanol will run fine in existing gasoline engines. The difference is in compatibility with seals, and ability to vaporize at lower temperatures. It's got a bit higher vapor pressure, so in northern US, it can create hard starting in the wintertime.
It does have a bit lower energy content per gallon, and higher oxygen content, which could confuse the electronic controls systems that most cars have now. They measure input airflow, and oxygen content in the exhaust, and decide how much fuel can be put in and still assure complete combustion. I don't know if ethanol might mess this up. Older cabureated cars you'd probably just have to reset the jets. The lower energy content per gallon also means that the mpg is a bit less. Somewhere around 10% I think??? If you designed the car to run only on ethanol, then you can typically use a much higher compression ratio (12:1 or so instead of 9:1 or less). This gives you back alot of the performance and mpg losses from using the lower energy content fuel. As far as seals, I haven't heard anything on ethanol causing seals to degrade, but I may be wrong. Just a few days ago on this listserve, there was a discussion on methanol, and the possibility of high concentrations of it hurting the aluminum and light alloy engines. It seems like if it did have issues with corrosion or rubber degradation, 10% would be enough to cause them, and since most of the winter gas sold in the northern US is 10% ethanol for pollution control, I imagine it doesn't. I wonder if they are using 100% ethanol, or ~95% ethanol (which is what denatured ethanol usually is -- a little gasoline put in to keep you from drinking it), or 95% ethanol/5% water which I understand is the highest purity you can distill it to. At that ratio, it forms a constant boiling mixture, and you can't get it to 100% pure by distillation. Does anyone know how they get the last bit of water out? And whether it would affect the engine if they didn't? It's in solution, so I imagine it would just cause a little more water vapor in the exhaust, and slighly lower mpg. It shouldn't cause freezing, since I've tried to freeze 100 proof vodka, and it stays liquid at -10F, and this woud equivalent to 190 proof. My two cents. On 9/9/05, Keith Addison <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > A new list member (hi there!) told listadmin this a few days ago: > > >Ethanol has been introduced in Manila just this month and > >I'm getting excited about it. The rising costs of fuel is really a > >burden here and through this list, I hope I would be able to gain > >lots of knowledge about Ethanol. Our government is encouraging us to > >use this fuel, they're telling us that we don't have to convert our > >engines in order for us to use Ethanol. I'm a little bit hesitant but > >I guess they're right coz I've been reading various sites from the web > >and they all said that there's no for us to have our existing engines > >converted nor there are any bad effects in using Ethanol. > > Any comments? > > Best wishes > > Keith > > > _______________________________________________ > Biofuel mailing list > Biofuel@sustainablelists.org > http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org > > Biofuel at Journey to Forever: > http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html > > Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): > http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/ > > _______________________________________________ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
