What's the difference in a flex-fuel engine that lets it burn either unleaded gasoline or E85 (85% Ethanol) ?
Is it possible or even economical to convert a conventional IC engine to run E85?
What's involved?
snipped-for-privacy@dodgecity.cc wrote in news:0pjv521gtuf6c0s4b61ndoaa91lkoqptm0@
4ax.com:
It's simply not worth it:
It's not going to save you money because your car would use a lot more fuel. On an older non computer car it's easy to run it. Have to make the mixture richer, you should advance the timing and make sure all the parts in the fuel system can live in alcohol.
Al
Thanks Al. I guess coming from the natural gas industry as I do that I should have known it's all about BTU. Alcohol certainly will burn, but not as efficiently as plain old gasoline. Hard to beat those old hydrocarbons.
They've really got things genuinely f%!$#d up down here in Houston. Here we are, 50 freakin miles from the refineries and there's spot gas shortages all over town. Retailers are complaining that their tanks have to be flushed out a couple times (with what I don't know) to allegedly "scrub" out the MTBE before they can refill with 87E10 so they're each out of service for at least 2 days while that occurs.
Someone please help me understand. If that's so then why don't we consumers likewise have to flush out our complete fuel systems before buying a tankful of 87E10?
It's all a conspiracy. The big oil companies are not in the oil business; they're in the oil shortage business. Withold the supply and it suddenly becomes gold.
That is not exactly true. Alchol does burn very effectively and cleanly, the problem is that a gallon of it has a lot less heat content than gas does and the "heat" is what drives a internal combustion engine. The nice thing about alchol is that if you built a engine to run on it exclusively, it has a much higher octane than gas so you can run around a 12 to 1 CR ratio and extract a larger percentage of the availble energy and convert it to work. The average gas engine is about 30% efficent at best which means 30% is converted to work and the rest goes out through tail pipe and cooling system. (some of it is lost to internal friction too)
----------------- The SnoMan
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