Engine: D5: Diesel to Ethanol / Petrol Conversion

[stuart bowes]

Originally Posted by Laird Scooby

69L, 1830bhp V16 diesel converted to spark ignition and methane fueling.

[Laird Scooby]

Originally Posted by stuart bowes

It's still a Renault, even with that engine in it!

I was thinking more along the lines of :



Turbos the size of dustbins that you can't quite see from that angle!

[stuart bowes]

definitely todays winner of top trumps

one of my favourites is the Kempton park steam engine, different kettle of fish obviously

[old onions]

E85 fuel has been one the main transport fuels in Brazil for decades, but this was more for economic reasons than anything else.
Brazil has no (or very little) oil deposits, but it produces millions of tonnes of sugar cane which can be fermented and then distilled to give E85 relatively cheaply, and of course it saves importing oil for the country's economy.
However the economics are rather different in most other parts of the world, including Europe.

Did you know that the other 15% is mainly water?

If you want to use ethanol to blend into petrol feedstocks and produce fuels like E10 and E20, then you cannot use the E85 model because the water will form a 2 phase system with the petrol, and the ethanol , being totally soluble in water, is going to migrate into the aqueous phase, not the hydrocarbon.
In order to use ethanol as a blend feedstock it must be minimum 99%, and this means a higher cost distillation process , followed by dehydration of some type, because you cannot produce a higher concentration than 95% by distillation alone.

The rationale for the EC mandate about ethanol use in petrol (gasoline) is driven more by the need to consume agricultural surpluses and keep the farming lobby happy , than it is being "renewable" or "better for the environment" imho.

There are good technical arguments for using ethanol in gasoline, it does burn with a cleaner profile than a hydrocarbon fuel, it does give up a relatively high latent heat of evaporation (so the charge has a "cooling" effect) which is particularly beneficial to turbo and supercharged power plants.
However it only contains about 70% of the chemical energy with respect to hydrocarbons, so it is less beneficial to fuel consumption. However talk of consumption being affected by as much as 10% is rubbish. The maths is not complex.

The bigger problems for older cars is the fact that ethanol is a much stronger solvent than gasoline, so old steel fuel tanks that were coated in lacquers get dissolved, fuel lines made of some rubber polymers can get swollen, and certain metals in carbs, like brass, can be corroded.

Apologies for going on at length, I used to work in the chemical industry and had a project to bring "wine-lake" ethanol to the gasoline pool in the 1980s and 1990s. The project failed due to the staunch resistance of the oil companies. I was about 15 years too early , ah well.