Bret Ludwig wrote:
> However, alcohols can increase engine power and act as a powerful
> cleaning agent in engines set up for it. It also burns cooler.
>
How can alcohol "increase engine power?" It can't. Either the engine is
optimized for alcohol (and yes, you can extract a great deal of power
from engines that use alcohol as fuel) or an engine is NOT optimized to
burn alcohol. There's no direct comparison without changing the fuel
system and compression ratio.
Now if you do allow changing the fuel system, how do you compare?
Probably the best way is on engine size. For any given engine
displacement, setting it up to burn gasoline will net more horsepower
out of the engine since more chemical energy can be pulled into the
engine in the form of air/fuel mixture because the energy density of
gasoline is higher. Its arguable that in the case of turbocharged or
supercharged engines, you could run more boost with alcohol and
therefore extract more power, but that is tantamount to simply
increasing engine displacement anyway.
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