Alcohol / Ethanol Engine

yes but when ethanol is produced on a large scale, its cheaper than pure ethanol which is produced on industrial purpose.. its by products are also organic and can be used as cattle feed.. the net cost seems lesser and alternative fuel is also very mandatory today right...

Exactly. I looked at these costs as far back as 1973 and for all intents and purposes the price of ethanol is the same as gasoline on a per unit of energy basis. Besides, I am firmly convinced that the impact of corn conversion from ethanol is a lose-lose situation. Finally, IMHO while GW may be an issue, weather variability and the impact of carbon emissions is a total red herring.

Have you prepared the engine to withstand the corrosive effects of ethanol?

Mechmerizer

Ethanol is good for enviroment , is cheaper than petrol if is produced in large scale. you are right...but this is not so ease ..

Ethanol have more or less 4% of water in your composition. This water will combine

with tubes, injectors, tank, and will produce corrusion in the system.

You will need to prepare all the pipes, injector and tank to prevent corrosion. We normaly make a chemical treatment ( nickel ) in this system.

The ethanol compression rate is not the same of petrol, and you will need to change de height of the head of its pistons to get a rate around 10,5:1

Although the alcohol ensures an increase of power to the engine in relation to petrol, consumption will be higher and you should have an efficiency around 75% if your engine has adjusted well. You must consider the price os the 2 fuels. To make a hibrid engine , you will need to have a electronic device and a sensor in the exaust system, to control the mixture of air and fuel to give the right volume of air and etahnol/petrol that you will use. You can make some search in internet on Brasilian sites, because we have 30 years of experience in ethanol use.

water content in ethanol is accepted.. that is why we plan on dehydrating it before usage.. whats your view on it.. it may also considerably increase combustion efficiency

Burning ethanol still produces harmfull hydrocarbons so it is not as 'green' as some would have you believe.

Brazil was highly succesfull in ethanol production but is now concentrating on oil exploration (quite succesfully I should add).

When Brazil first used ethanol it was discovered that seals and certain metals corroded in the engine. Aluminium cylinder heads in the Volkwagens became pitted and also the valve seats. Oil seals became stiff and cracked.

Energy output lower than petrol each litre, can be defeated with flash steam accompanied Ethonal combustion.

Saturated air intake fuel injected, air cooled water recovery.

Ethanol and water may be fuel mix.

Residue heat distills Ethanol and water seperation, air mix combustion.

Ceramic sleaved cylinder defeats steam pitting of walls.

Problem goes even better on Oil fuels.

Or increasing engine efficiency by going pulse jet turbine combustion water enclosed.

The makeings are there for both.

Cheers

Peter

You are correct. Look at the BTU comparison to petrol and you will understand why it takes more Ethanol to do the same WORK as petrol.

This is where the Anti-HHO, fairy dust engineers lose their credibility.

hey thanks for all the comments guys..

have considered some of the factors already but got a lot of new inputs.. thanks and keep giving views.. many thanks..

To make efficient use of ethanol, engines must be designed and built for the purpose. In practice, a GM flex fuel SUV that gets 16 mpg on gasoline gets 11 mpg on E85.

As ethanol is produced in the US, on average, as much (or more) petroleum energy is consumed in its production as is recovered in the ethanol, according to Pimental, at Cornell University. Other studies have been even gloomier, and some rosier. Averaging across studies, ethanol comes out looking mediocre, environmentally. In the US, ethanol is subsidized to bring its price closer to in line with its energy content (although in a practical sense this does not work -- the prices are still too high if you compare the cost of running on E85 vs gasoline.)

Despite all this, it would be interesting to see how well an engine that was designed and built to run specifically on E85 would do. Such an engine would be expected to run poorly on gasoline, so it would best be introduced in a place like Brazil, where ethanol is widely available. Perhaps it could be funded as a demonstration project for one of the switch grass (cellulosic) producers?

Ethanol is not a panacea, but it certainly seems light-years ahead of hydrogen.

In your opinion, what would be needed to raise the efficiency of the GM flex fuel engine when used with E85? Would it need more compression, larger volumes of fuel, or ignition timing changes?

A good question. The thermodynamic efficiency should be very close, even without modifying the engine to optimize it for Ethanol. Ethanol is a lower energy fuel, with about 81,000 btu per gallon vs gasoline at about 118,000. 16 mpg x 81/118 = 10.98 ... which is not the answer I expected at first. This means that the observed mpg is exactly in line with the expected mpg. (What I thought was that the difference was larger than the difference in btu content.)

If we optimized engines to run on Ethanol, I think increasing compression ratio and making slight adjustments in timing would be about the extent of it. I believe the timing adjustments are done automatically in flex fuel vehicles, according to the percentage of ethanol in the mix, which is continuously monitored. (The mixture adjustments are done this way too, and then rechecked and readjusted in the closed loop system.)

In a perfect world the low energy value of ethanol would be compensated by low cost. In the US, ethanol is subsidized to make it closer to competitive -- but last I checked, it was still more expensive to run your car on E85 than to run it on gasoline (because you need much more ethanol). And of course the subsidy only makes the difference appear to be smaller than it is -- we still pay the higher cost, through taxes, making it less obvious.

According to GREET figures gasoline is delivered to the pump with 80.8% efficiency. (That is remarkably high efficiency, because distilling the gas out of crude in not too energy intensive, and the pipeline distribution system is pretty efficient. Ethanol is delivered with 58% efficiency -- not great, but not awful. The major problem, is that we are essentially making a fuel, not just separating it out. Where efficiency starts to look dismal is with electricity (38% from well to plug)... but even that is better than liquid H2 at 34%.

Re electricity, the comparison is unfair, because the fuel (coal, natural gas, etc.) is burned at the power plant. The heat engine is the big source of inefficiency. A car engine (other than the Prius engine) is less efficient than even a coal-fired plant, so on a well-to-wheels basis, electric cars come out ahead (because the vehicle itself is so much more efficient.)

Re hydrogen, the 34% efficiency point outs that if you burned this stuff in a car engine (as is done in the BMW 7 series hydrogen car) at 25% efficiency, you would be evil incarnate environmentally speaking -- it would be hard to conceive of a lower-efficiency arrangement. The fact that BMW does this with their 12 cylinder gas guzzler seems obscenely cynical -- compounded by the fact that the car looses half its fuel in 9 days of sitting, because it must be vented as the fuel warms from way below zero toward ambient.

What a world.

"If we optimized engines to run on Ethanol, I think increasing compression ratio and making slight adjustments in timing would be about the extent of it."

Back in the mid seventies we had an engine that was an older military duel fuel engine. There was a lever on the engine itself, used when changing from one fuel to another. I remember thinking at the time it was adjusting the compression of the engine.

With today's improved electro-mechanical abilities, how can we change the compression on an engine on demand?

What about a domed intrusion into the combustion chamber that could be retracted for gasoline use? This combined with dual ECM maps might be able to boost the efficiency of the engine when run on each fuel.

I have to go now. The men from the sanitarium are back again for me.

"how can we change the compression on an engine on demand?"

http://www.saabnet.com/tsn/press/000318.htm

You would be better to go with Compressed Natural Gas. CNG is cleaner and CHEAPER than All the other fuels available. The price varies all over the place but is still the cheapest. Natural gas is methane, which can be produced by anaerobic digestion of our organic waste. In other words it is renewable. No crops necessary. CNG vehicles have been around for years. Cities are going with CNG for their buses. There IS an infrastructure that can be easily expanded. If you have access to natural gas at your house you can, with the installation of an special fueling appliance, fuel up at home for even less than at the commercial pumps. CNG will increase the life of your engine. The only drawback to CNG is the range, more like 200 miles vs 400 miles. So, you will have to refuel more often. A small inconvenience for a cleaner car. Forget ethanol. Forget Biodiesel. Biomethane is the better biofuel. Check it out

you are right about CNG but the problem is the availabilty and mass production.. how much bio gas can be produced to run a city full of vehicles and globalise it?? i had this concept also.. but my application area was in farms where biogas is probuced with human waste and animal waste.. we can plan on running farm tractors or generators in the farm itself and generating biogas wont be a problem there...

Coal seam gas is Methane. Availability is improved with so much Coal seam gas coming on line. Our enviroent is changing, and its time for us to do things different.

Fuels such as Ethanol and Methane are only ineficiant in ineficient engines. The piston engine falls into that catagory.

We have the fuels, now we must overcome piston stranglehold on engines.

Cheers

Peter

so whats the replacement, steam piston, steam turbine, gas turbine, what is it?

Coal seam methane has been exploited for 30 years now, a lot of major coal seam gas fields are on decline, nope, we have tapped that resource.

Hello Vincini,

For six years DaS has been putting its money on the gas turbine.

The gas turbine, is but one part of many needed in gas turbine energy conversion.

Those many other parts that go into making a gas turbine rotate use energy that could otherwise go to end product.

Replacement of form not reaction, reduced the combustion turbine/engine to one moving part, it being the turbine.

Compression, combustion and ignition are as found in piston engines.

Lifting of engine efficiency to 80% made natural gas directly competative to Petrol.

Inclusion of flash heat recycle Co2 took it far beyound Diesel.

Technology of today is not seen today.

Natural gas is People power.

Extinction of the Oil dependancy, steam turbines, and piston engines has some resistance on a broad feild, these you mention in your opening statement.

Cheers

Peter

thanks DaS.. but dont you think we are drifting off-topic in the discussion.. turbines are not the matter as of now.. whats the status on engines??? anyways if you are a gas turbine expert also think about using this in planes... We shall first discuss compatibilty and then switch to efficiency...

Hello Mechmerizer,

Sorry to confuse.

DaS Engine was developed to replace the piston engine, its not a turbine in the normal sense but uses a hydro turbine in place of a crankshaft, and uses liquid in place of a solid piston. The compression, combustion and exhaust pricipal is the same as in piston engines. Its 80% efficiency makes alcohol as good as Petrol in a standard combustion engine. By adding Co2 into the mix greater combustion pressure is arrived at further increasing the milage per gallon.

Cheers

Peter

hey wow.. this stuff your company makes is really interesting.. i don think i know any thing about this.. can you mail me some link or some files providing more information if you are allowed to do so..??? i could work on something... my email: cutecriminal@gmail.com thanks, Hari

Peter,

Can you supply some images of how your engine works?

Cheers!

Sorry, back yard inventor, everything in drawing, but we produced working model.

Concept. In refrigeration liquid refrigerant (Co2)is made into high pressure vapour pushing through a restrictor hole condensing the vapour into liquid.

The energy from the pressure not being put to use, when a turbine replaces the restrictor hole and produces power as by product.

To obtain even greater efficiency we moved to the DaS Valve which is a water pump having no moving part, aside floating ball.

Your picture prior.

The DaS Valve is attached to hydro turbine with header tank.

Co2 heats in a pipe forcing water out, then the Co2 gets out and cools down before being drawn back in again with inrushing water refilling the water pipe.

Water is pumped into a tank, then the gas pressure used to put it there is released into the tank forcing the water back down again, up one side the turbine and down the other.

1 litre flow at 9 bar pressure is 720 watts, multiply by Charles Law, and flow or both.

So long 9 bar pressure decrease exists below chosen heat point Co2 phase diagrahm the generator shall produce unaided.

Because the Co2 is going from high heat, high pressure to reverse motion is created.

The water being pumped is heat convey medium to the Co2.

Cheers

Peter

we import natural gas too, we are fully dependant on others for our natural gas. We would be INDEPENDANT IF, the open market allowed gas to go higher and we shutdown 100% of our gas turbines making electricity AND STOPPED wasteing NG in transportation.

Have been in energy business for over 20 yrs. Agree with all those that say ethanol is red herring. As soon as you start to clear land to grow corn, cane, whatever, you lose the environmental benefit. Besides, studies indicate that dedicating ALL of the arable land in US to corn would not produce enough ethanol to fuel vehicles in US. Yes, Brazil has had good success, but they can grow sugar cane there, 3 times more ethanol productive than corn, and they are slashing/burning jungle to do it.

Look to Argentina for a more practical answer- natural gas is the cleanest of the fossil fuels. All taxis in Buenos Aires run on natgas since the 80's because it's cheaper. Natgas doesn't have as much heating value as gasoline, but way more than ethanol. Conversion to natgas in Argentina costs a couple thousand bucks; it's probably cheaper here.

Large-scale hydrogen may someday happen, but we won't live to see it. Natgas has always been cheaper than gasoline in this country, sometimes WAY cheaper. So, it is folly to think that we would would build a huge infrastructure to produce and distribute H2, when natgas has always been readily available and cheaper than gasoline.- My 2 cents.

Thankfully the current market price of corn has bankrupted many ethanol plants in the US. Some hadn't even started production yet!

Germany has had severe problems with cars that ran on gasohol. They are now switching to NG.

You got some very good advice here (CNG, etc). I've traveled to Brasil quite a bit. Had one friend that used "Alcool" in his gasoline engine. He started the engine on gasoline, and once it was running, switched over to alcohol. For him it was economics, the price differential between the two fuels. However, when we were traveling up mountains, or he needed a boost of power to pass, he switched over to gasoline.

The brazillans have a lot of experience with doing this, so I echo the post that said consult there and stand on some shoulders.

BTW, are you trying to produce your own ethanol, too? Because, ethanol produced by industrial plants in the US for fuel usage is dehydrated to remove the last 4% of water.

so do you say ethanol is not as power/torque producing as petrol??? how about comparing to diesel????

Sorry the story only gets sadder.

Diesel is the pwerfullest of oil fuels.

Cheers

Peter

agreed but the torque factor??? and one query.. ethanol can be ignited in spark??

Torge, is leverage much like a long stick, one foot long with 1 pound weight on end is !fp.

Turbines give greatest torgue as they are esentialy long sticks welded to a hub.

Cheers

Peter

ok whatever.. what about ignition???

All fuels will ignite by same means,

Piston engines cant compete with turbines.

well i'm not talking turbines here.. the reason i bothered about the ignition is that i've been hoping if i can make a common engine which runs both alcohol and gasoline.. may be when you need higher power we can switch over.. heard that kind of engines exist for dual fuels.. have seen petrol engines switch over to LPG for economy once upon a time when LPG was cheap in india..! now inflation messed things up but still i'm bothered about efficincy.. any comments????

turbine have terrible torque, they make horsepower because torque times rpm is horsepower and they spin at huge speeds.

Diesels make great torque because of their 20 to 1 compression ration, but they suck at horspower because they have lower maximum rpms. The gasoline/alcohol engines give medium torque, but they can run the rpms up. So they are the winner in the horsepower game.

Vincini,

I am not an engineer. but from our work a turbine can be subject to combustion pressure of any Diesel engine.

The moment of force applied on a turbine lever/vane can be much farther away from the hub than piston crankshaft engine, greater the leverage the greater the torgue.

RPM is much lower on the turbine as it is more much efficient.

Modern combustion turbines such as DaS have only one moving part, this being the turbine.

Liquid is more solid than any metal but remains liquid whilst doing that previously done using metal.

Cheers

Peter

Where do hydrazine and nitromethane fit into your scale?

DAS was speaking about common fuels.. petrol, diesel, alcohol.. N2o is not used directly as a fuel is it?? its just a power booster.. the factor is running fuels to effiency and cost factor and still concentrating on minimum power..

Are you old enough to remember Mr Mulligan?

Either not old enough, or Alzheimer's.

My apologies to John Mulligan, i bought the rumors that he'd been running hydrazine in the mix.

http://beebe-mulligan.com/B-M-1969-2.shtml

Cool pix & nice story, if you're into vintage topfuel cars.

Yes now that you shake some cobwebs off my grey matter, I do remember Beebe & Mulligan. I was not aware of his tragic death though. Nice articles and pictures.

Bob,

Sorry for so long in reply, these web thingies lose me.

Checked out every gas we could find. Needed one that could be vapourised and condensed by existing refrigeration cycle. Co2 does this in Cryogenics.

Cheers

Peter

The remark about nitromethane, and hydrazine was related to your post of diesel fuel producing the most power of any fuel.

Thanks Bob,

Adding the gasses you suggest would increase temperature, and any temperature rise increase's the power output when Co2 is added to the expanding air combustion.

Power increase is Charles law, and Co2 phase diagrahm Co2 Supercritical.

Cheers

Peter

Indy cars and alcohol fueled dragsters have used various alcohols for years. Kind of a been there done that research path isn't it?

As portable dynos have become more popular, we are seeing them at some larger car gatherings. The winners of these horsepower contests have learned that for pure horsepower numbers, alcohol is a winner.

My 2 cents- I concur with both you guys, as a rodder from w-a-y back. Methanol fueled engines make serious power; smell good too. Interestingly though, it is because alcohol has a high octane number; methanol's Btu value is still significantly lower than gasoline's. What racers do is to pump up the engine's static compression ratio way up taking advantage of methanol's high octane and then use a much richer mixture than with gasoline, thus more than making up for methanol's lower Btu value. It works well, except that you need to go to the industrial solvents supplier to buy 55 gallon drums of the stuff and then lug them around to the track, the dyno, etc. Not too practical for the street. Best kept "alternative fuel" secret is that propane's octane number is right up there with methanol's. Both fuels have an octane number of around 100 MON / 110 RON. And propanes Btu value is not far below gasoline's. An innovative rodder could switch to propane and run 15:1 compression on the street and easily fuel up at the same time / place you get your bar-b-que tank filled.

Propane is 97.6 and about 99.9 for octane values. The problem is that the propane in the tanks at the store also contain 5% ethane and 1 % butane. This really upsets fuel quality issues. Propane is 99,000 BTUs/ gallon where as gasoiline is 125,000, 25% is significant.

The gain would be if you used the 200 psi pressure on the propane tank to direct inject the propane after the air intake valve has closed. Now more air in cylinder.

yes precisely.. anyone help me on that..

That four percent or so of water in the ethanol...you need that. It flashes into steam, providing pressure (= power) then combines with the CO2 to make hydrogen, which burns again....a beautiful thing. And it cools the cylinder walls, reducing the temperature gradient and improving efficiency, and incidently rusting your engine. On the other hand, it is a naturally occuring antifreeze.

If you didn't have it occuring naturally, you would probably have to add it.

The problem of course is that the more you tune your engine to work well, the less likely it will perform well on questionable fuels. There is a WWII vintage truck mounted engine in the local museum which burned the gasses given off from heated wood...made right there in a sort of primitive on board refinery. I don't think it could be termed "efficient". Far from it! OTOH, gasoline was rationed, and wood was plentiful, and a byproduct of this engine was charcoal..a very useful item. I suppose some clever modern engineer could use this idea and run with it...creating vehicles which would run on, say...trash. There seems to be an abundance of trash we could use....grin! I have often wondered if there was some way to fuel airplanes on their own maintenance paperwork.....but I digress.

(Of course you could make an intermal combustion engine that would "run", what would be needed would be one which could run efficiently, with a minimum of dirty exhaust. THAT, my friend is why we need the engineer!)

As far as helping you on your problem....it is easy to get a piston engine which runs of E-85. This still requires 15% gasoline...the alcohol need not be all that pure, and it can dissolve all sorts of oils and esters. You can mix a lot of burnable liquid junk in with E-85 and it will still work okay. Profit will always lie in finding a use for industrial waste. (A lot of bio-diesel seems to be polluted that way.)

Remember, the more you refine and purify your fuels, the more expensive they will be. So, your first step is to figure out what fuel you are using, and then purchase an engine off the shelf which will run with that fuel. What would be wrong with using the set up mentioned above where you switched from gasoline to ethanol and back again as desired? What more engineering do you want?

thats really damn good theory you got there yusuf.. my question is can any engine adapt from petrol to alcohol and back again in good efficiency?? i mean to say, when we design an engine for a fuel, we give it the right design for best efficiency, that design may not be suitable for another fuel. in that case when we use dual fuels we have to balance the efficiencies which means neither engines are most efficient.. thats what i'm concerned of...!!!

You ask...."can any engine adapt from petrol to alcohol and back again in good efficiency??"

Well, if we confine ourselves to standard off the shelf internal combustion engines...which are already far from efficient, they are normally set up with fuel injection systems run by a microchip. You can change these chips for different performance. How hard would it be to switch chips along with changing fuel? Answer...not really very hard.

Some research...

http://www.necel.com/en/faq/mi_com/__com_con.html

http://www.electronicsforu.com/electronicsforu/articles/categoryTree.asp?id=23

http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:N6zD08uNkEwJ:www.freightbestpractice.org.uk/download.aspx%3Fpid%3D111%26action%3Dsave+microchip+fuel+injector+fuel+variances&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=ca

http://www.tangram.co.uk/TI-Energy%20Management%20-%20Fuel%20Management%20Guide%20(GPG307).pdf

And the idea of microchip design being used to assist the process of "going green" can be found here.

http://blogs.edmunds.com/greencaradvisor/2008/08/microchips-helping-auto-industry-speed-environmental-advances.html

So, your bottom line, can it be efficient with any fuel, the answer is "sure, just swap out the appropriate chip.

Obviously, there may be ways to simply throw a switch to access the appropriate chip...but right now...this will work.

You might try some of the products available here...

http://blogs.edmunds.com/greencaradvisor/2008/08/microchips-helping-auto-industry-speed-environmental-advances.html

Modifying these microchips is normally not done except by hobbiests and of course, the automotive manufacturers themselves....putting in a non-standard chip will void your warranty of course...however it can be done.

Your a man I would much like to talk with, a can do chap.

I'm not that hot at describing things, hope this makes sense.

Wikipedia has phase diagrahm for Co2.

Our demo model use a Pelton hydro turbine.

Better using a Francis 92% efficient, burn alcohol for heat.

Cheers

Peter

Kind of you to say so. " A can do chap"....I like that, and thank you.

The use of alternate prime movers is an excellent avenue to follow, and turbines, hot air stirling engines, steam engines, and phase change engines are wonderful and fruitful means to an end. However, this is only a comment on a forum, not a whole book, and so I'll confine myself to one thread.

The research on improving internal combustion engines has been done...the answer was to see what other people have done and to not try to "re-invent the wheel", so to speak. Most people are not surprised that there are many folks whose hobby is to tinker with engines, however these same people are often a bit surprised that part of tinkering with engines is to play around with the microchips that now drive almost all modern automobiles. This does require an interdisciplinary approach.

The future belongs to the person who is able to make these dedicated microchips more responsive to variable weather conditions, different and possibly impure fuels, variable performance requirements, and reliability. As fuel supply problems plague the world, this is the direction that technology has to go in order to fit into the new reality. And it is being done now, not in some nebulous future. I am sure there is work, money, and success in the life of anybody who takes this task on.

Regards.

Bill