conversion for burning ethanol

Besides an alky carb and all hard fuel lines what else is needed to burn ethanol...guys times and fuels are a changing...we need to look into this.
they are building ethanol stations as we speak...
"We shall not go quietly into the night" but with much screaming and revving of our engines. :evilsmile

 

if ethanol bothers rubber like methanol does, then fuel pump & certain lines must be addressed, as must aluminum parts.

 

well i dont know about the grabber, but as much fun is made of it i am seriously considering diesel for my old pickup on the next rebuild and even the ski boat(there are companies that sell them that way now) definately would have to look at the REAL cost of buying a biodiesel system and such per gallon first though because i hate the smell of the regular stuff.

 

So far I have yet to see a station in the state of GA selling any alternative fuels. But when they do, I'll be the first to consider converting over what ever Maverick I'm driving by then.

 

An easier way out would be to get a ffv duratec out of a ford 500 or a ffv vulcan out of a taurus, convert it to rwd and replace all the lines, hoses, etc. So you could still switch from E85 to regular.

 

I'm undecided on alternatives as of yet. In a few years I think we will see a clear cut winner

 

Ethanol costs more to produce than standard gasoline ... but is hugely subsidized by our tax money .... so using Ethanol at $1.89 a gallon is like getting a $20 tax return every fillup!

 

Here in corn rich IL, the snobs are fighting the ethynol plants. One proposed plant near me is being fought hard by idiots who moved out of the city to fight zoning. Now they want zoning in the country. I think the fuel will catch up with us verses the other way.
Dan

 

Starting from the tank, use a Poly fuel cell with line sized larger for alky use and alum fitting that are anodized.
The fuel pump is from Edelbrock.
The carb has to be modified for more flow volume to satify the air/fuel ratios of the E85 formulation at wide open throttle. Special gaskets and seals should be used.
The ignition timing should be recurved.
Lastly, there could be long term problems letting the E85 fuel set in the carb for any extended length of time. It may be prudent to have a way to switch over to regular gas feed to the carb until the engine shows it is in the carb, then shut the engine down. Some of the effects of letting it set in the carb is stuck accelerator pump needles and float needles, throttle shaft freeze in the base casting.
In cold weather there will be harder starting.
The crank case oil must be changed more often.
For high performance the ignition will need to be a hotter system.
Summit has about all these parts in the catalog.
The overall cooling system temp may need to be altered with a different thermostat.
These items are listed for the better attempt to run this fuel long term. One can always get away without some of these items on a short term basis but will be a problem over the long term.
I have a lot of insight on alky fuel use in race engines and can tell you that there are certain things that must be attended to or you end up with problems.
These item are in reference to an older car or simluar setup and not to modern fuel injection that is intended to run on E85 and has fuel system with a more limited contact with the fuel, otherwise known as flex fuel vehichles.
I currently run a 500 hp 351w powered sprinter on 100% meth with front mounted belt driven pump, large feed and return lines as well as a fuel log with it's own regulator. This system has to be taken apart every day after racing and drained, feed WD40 or gas in order to have it trouble free the next weeks use.
The engine is cold blooded at starting and needs at least 150° coolant temp to begin to idle without stalling then will idle at 1000 rpm. (the long cam, unheated intake etc. dosn't help)
Have run Kart engines on alky for many years and modified stock carbs and the Tilison carbs to run alky on these modified motors.
I would like to say a few words about using e85 as far as emmisions goes.
These fuels are not all the answer to the emmissions issues because these fuels also result in other emmissions that are also harmfull to the air you breathe as a result of combustion. If you ever been around an alky motor, you eyes burn a lot as well as breathing the fumes in.
Another item is the use of higher compression using these fuels is also a problem in the generation of nitric ox emmissions trying to gain back more work conversion from the lower BTU heat ratings of the alkies.
For a very full presentation on motor fuel, there is a 57 page paper on automotove gasolenes by one Bruce Hamilton. This paper lays out a lot of technical information about all aspects well as alternative fuels and formulations..

 

Wow! Bruce Hamilton knows a lot about gasoline. Thanks for the info but, I can't help feeling overwhelmed by the complexity of the subject. My head hurts a bit after reading that article.

 

Ethanol is not hard on neoprene hoses and diaphrams like methanol is. Ethanol is a good substitute for gasoline but only under some restrictions.
It takes about 40% more ethanol to produce the same power that you get from an equal amount of gasoline - IF no other changes are made. The ethanol (I will call it alcohol interchangably in this post but methanol is VERY different and I will not address that here) will require that you run a carburetor with larger passages but the fuel system is large enough in your car to handle it fine (unless you are racing). You will need to run a smaller radiator or block off some of the radiator that you currently run. You may need to run a hotter thermostat. You can advance your timing a bit with alcohol but you need to limit the amount to less overall advance than with gasoline. You will need a way to either preheat the air or your fuel when running alcohol until your engine warms up because it doesn't vaporize at low temperatures like gasoline does. There are several ways to do this. They include but are not limited to the following:
Run a small tank of gasoline to start your engine and run it until it is warm. Use glow plugs like the heaters that Perkins diesels used to preheat air as it entered the manifold. put a set of glow plugs under the carburetor to heat both fuel and air. Placing glow plugs in the intake manifold at each port to heat the air and fuel as it enters the port.
All this to get about half the miles per gallon as you drive your car around town. There has got to be a better way - and there is! The nice thing about alcohol is that it tollerates a lot more compression than gasoline does. You can increase your compression to 14:1 without danger of preignition when running ethanol. This will actually give you about a 50% increase in power while giving you the same or better economy in miles per gallon. If you can guarantee that you will always have ethanol to use in your car then you can put in the old 12 and 13 to 1 pop-up pistons that are used only in drag motors that are running methanol or nitro-methanol. Running these pistons on the street will present their own set of problems but it will make using alcohol a lot more pleasant to your pocketbook. Your 210 HP 302 getting 20 MPG would be a 315 HP 302 getting 20 to 21 MPG.
Alcohol produces less polutants is the cry of the misled. Alcohol, Ethanol in particular, does produce less CO and less HC per gallon but it produces more CO2 (a major greenhouse gas) and with the higher compression ratios it will produce tons of nitrous oxides. They can be treated successfully with a single element Catylitic convertor into hydrochloric and sulfuric acids that decompose quickly in sunlight.

Why aren't we all running alcohol?
Alcohol is expensive to make. Not true! from a bushing of corn that costs $6 you can make 6 gallons of alcohol, 35 pounds of high grade feed for livestock, and about 15 pounds of fertilizer. Corn is not the best product to make alcohol from but it is a good one. When you add up the retail prices for all the things you get out of that bushel of corn you end up with fuel that costs about $2 a gallon. Under the best of conditions, and using the best products to make alcohol out of you can distil the 160 proof fuel for about $0.50 a gallon. The cost of making the fuel is not where the problem is. If I own a gas station and I need a fuel delivery and the local refinery is low on gas then it is shipped across the country in pipelines at 200 mph for little or no cost. If I need a shipment of alcohol and it is not produced in my area it has to be trucked to me at a cost of about $0.08 per mile ( or more now days). On the west end of the Great Lakes Region there are many E85 stations because it is being produced (the farms and refineries are there) locally. In Western Washington there are no stations selling E85. There are no farms and no refineries in this area. If alcohol is so cheap the why is E85 so expensive? - It costs a lot more to make 200 proof alcohol than it does to make 160 proof and E85 is 200 proof alcohol mixed with 15% gasoline - to "denature" it so that the government can be sure that you don't go home and start drinking from your fuel tank. The government regulations are what makes the alcohol hard to make, hard to transport and expensive to use. If you are going to use alternative fuels you are going to have to get the government out of the process.

 

we would all be rich if we could figure out how to get the government out of about 25-50% of what its into. but then that politics (insert barfing icon here)

 

Just a couple of holes that need to be plugged.

1) It cost more than $.08/mi to ship anything in fuel costs alone, not to mention vehicle costs, labor, overhead, etc. etc.

2) it's impossible to get 6 gallons of fuel out of a bushel or corn. At most in ideal situations you can yield 2.5 gallons per bushel. Most industrial application measure it at 84 gallons per ton of corn.

3) Processing the corn by means other than fermentation (not very fast or efficient) requires lots of energy. First you have the shell it, then grind it, then cook it (170F), then boil it (220F), then distill it. You can ferment it by cooking it at a lower temperature for a longer time, but the % yield is much lower (think beer instead of whiskey). However, with fermentation, you can sell the wart leftovers to feed cattle. So, it's kind of cogenerative. If you boil the ground corn to break down the starches into sugars, there isn't much useful byproduct.

4) You still have to burn coal or natural gas to power the cookers and distillers and grinders, unless we can find a way to efficiently and reliably run it off of solar or geotherm.

5) You can't distill to 200 proff (100% alcohol) without a benzene catalyst (too much water vapor in the alcohol), so most companies won't even attempt that. They'll stick to the 160-180 range, because benzene is fairly lethal if you try to drink it. That means there's going to be even less BTUs per gallon since water doesn't burn so well.

6) There is not enough tillable land in the 48 states to support our current energy consumption.

So, corn isn't so great. There are lots of other plants we can use to make booze though. Such as sugar cane!! mmmmm... ruuuummmm.. aaahhhh... Lost my train of thought. Oh yeah! Rum can be made very efficiently through fermentation alone because we don't have to convert startch to sugar. One ton of sugar cane or molasses will yield about 73 gallons of ethenol through fermentation which can be done in the sun pretty easy. This gives our neighbors south of the border a distinct energy advantage since they can grow and ferment sugar cane year round. That's ok, because farm subsidies here in the US are driving up the world market price of food, so farmers down there can't afford to grown anything other than pot and cocaine. So, by the time ethenol demand is high enough they can afford to grow sugar again, it will also end the war on drugs and we can send some of the CIA boys back home and stop installing puppet governments in south american countries and spending so much frivolous money down there.

As long as I'm on my soap box, I'll throw this out there too. Burning the booze is not the right way to go, but will do in the mean time. Ethanol contains 6 molecules of hydrogen per alcohol atom. We can convert these hydrogen atoms into useful electricity by first passing it through a catalyst to generate hydrogen ions, and then combining that with oxygen ions in a proton exchange membrane fuel cell to produce enough electricity to power and heat your car or home.

 

This has been a good discussion.
The moral of the story is, Ethonal is not the 'savor' that it appears to be. Yet!