Don Stauffer wrote:
> Bret Ludwig wrote:
> >>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.
> >
> >
> > In the late 1970s and early 1980s the USAC cars were putting out
1000+
> > bhp out of the 166 CID Turbo Offy. On gasoline it is doubtful much
more
> > than 200-250 hp would have been possible.
>
> Because the engines were DESIGNED to use alcohol, and running 12 - 14 to
> 1 compression ratio.
>
> > Alcohols allow radically more power to be produced in certain cases
> > because of alcohols' higher octane rating, and also the alcohol
fuelled
> > engines can be run very rich which allows the alcohol to act as a
> > cooling medium.
> >
>
> As the previous poster said, CERTAIN cases- not the case with unmodified
> engine or one designed with variable compression (only a handful of such
> designs throughout history).
>
> > The 1952 GM LeSabre show car used a clean-sheet-of-paper engine which
> > was dual-fuel, but not in the sense of the current FFVs. It had a
> > gasoline carburetor used for starting and cruising and a methanol one
> > which opened progressively at high power.
> >
>
> But what was compression ratio, and did it generate more power on
> alcohol? It is not that hard to make dual fuel engines- current E-85
> engines are such dual fuel engines.
>
> My gripe against ethanol is that it creates more CO2 than gasoline.
> Yeah, current gas prices are high, but we need to start thinking about
> greenhouse emissions. Not good to solve one problem by worsening
> another. I think there are better alternate fuels. I am not against
> alternate fuels, but think ethanol is not the right one.
Bear in mind that the CO2 released by burning ethanol bio-fuel was the
same
carbon previously captured by whichever plant it's made from. In other
words
it's carbon neutral.
Graham
|
