kartweb

First you are quite correct, the rate of fuel consumption volume increased significantly, about 45%. Not only are there less C's & H's to bond with the O's per volume, but ethanol carries along an O to share with it's components.

And for those entropic minded keeping score, it takes about 10% the energy to liberate the O in ethanol as it gain back in bonding to a more powerful bond directly with a C or H. (If you don't understand why, do some research on cycloalkanes and bond angles).

In my case the racing fuel we used has 110 octane, about the same as ethanol. Our CR125's do indeed run high compression. 6.2 CCV against a swept 125cc volume. We also ran a nearly perfect mixture and an HRC Det Counter.

The advantage of ethanol came from two things;
First the extra oxygen in the ethanol.
Second is the higher heat of transformation that cools the charge, and is especially valuable in a 2 stroke.

The Biland also showed a healthy increase, despite being low compression. The Biland runs just fine on 89 octane as it was designed to run. Each of the (2) 125cc cylinders has a CCV of 11.5cc's. All we did was rejet it and reset the static ignition.

I wold have tried it with the Rotary Seatta we borrowed for a while except that there are some concerns with the existing lubrication system.

As far as tuning, I run a website that hasn't been updated in two years that caters to Karting and requires a $25 subscription to get access to the tuning and Data Acqusition operations info. We still get a healthy income from renewals, and have had subscribers that include Brad Coleman, Scott Speed, AJ Allmendinger, Brian Herta, Kyle Rahal, Marco Andretti, and Jimmy Vassar. If you run into Brad at one of the local Freebirds, tell him I said hi.

FloppinNachos

psscht, CR125s are for bitches. I tune/ride RS125s

haha, j/k


I wonder if we could use something like the HRC Det counter on our RX-8s? So we could actually figure out if it was detonating, unlike the crappy detonation listener thing we have on the engines now.

kartweb

If only they would let us run RS125's it would have made life so much easier.

Other then rod length when we get done we practically have an RS125 when we get done.

The HRC Det counter won't work on a Rennie.

I'm guessing you've been to this track

http://www.kartweb.com/Archives/Atlanta/snippet.wmv

I rented a 250 to play there. The last time I ran there a bridge was over turn 1 and there was no chicane before turn 11 so it's been a few years. That was in a C Sports Racer.

FloppinNachos

not the exact HRC det counter, but something that fit on the spark plugs. there might be something out there like this

FloppinNachos

so, you guys wanna see my pulsejet? it's real nice, I got it on sale at target, haha

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26FymT9dDzM&NR=1

YES I KNOW THERE IS A PROPANE TANK next to it, this is for start-up/warming for the diesel/gasoline.

Feras

iTrader: (1)

Like most alcohols ethanol is in fact not very complex at all, it is a simple hydrocarbon ethylene with an attached hydroxyl group. While yes adding an OH to ethylene does in fact increase the mass of oxygen that oxygen is by no means free and isn't just liquid oxygen floating around. I think ya need to rethink your basic chemistry. oh and btw the combustion of ethanol delivers 23.5 megajoules per liter, while gasoline delivers 34.8.

Feras

iTrader: (1)

btw this is not in anyway a knock on ethanol in general, i tihnk we should use it, its a reusable energy source that can end up costing very little (make it from the stalks of corn) and also end our reliance on imported fuels.

FloppinNachos

that's why I put the quotes on it. I know it's not just entirely free, but it gets oxygen into the combustion chamber. I know there are some bond energy things that I'm kind of rusty on, but if you have the final enthalpies then it doesn't really matter.

I said 12,800BTU/lb for ethanol and 18,500 for gasoline. You said 23.5MJ/L and 34.8MJ/L. They're both pretty close to each other. Either way you'll make more power with ethanol because the AFR is so much lower 23.5*(14.7/9)=38.4 .

Flashwing

The bottom line is Ethanol cannot survive in a free market which is why the federal government has to prop it up with major subsidies.

Here's the lastest stories to back up my facts:

Ethanol: How the promise dwindled

Here's the latest example that production of Ethanol takes more energy than what Ethanol would yield which means sacrificing other resources to produce it.

Big Corn and Ethanol Hoax

This article also spells out the subsidies that the government puts on Ethanol...

Over at the NPR they report that Ethanol is worse for the environment again debunking the excuse that it's worth to waste production to save the earth.

Study: Ethanol Worse for Climate Than Gasoline

I suppose I should also point out that vast parts of the Rain Forest are being burned, and cleared to plant trees that produce sap for Biofuel. I love how everyone wants to save the rain forest when we cut down trees for homes, paper, and other needs but to produce bio fuel nobody cares.

So what have we learned?

Ethanol costs more money, takes more resources, and produces less energy than it does with oil or gasoline. It's incapable of surviving in a free market which is why BILLIONS of subsidies are paid out every year to famers and Ethanol producers. Finally, we're seeing that the investments into Ethanol are already failing and energy companies are losing tons of cash.

FloppinNachos

I don't know about that. The figures I've always read were 1.4 units of energy out for every 1 unit of energy in.

kartweb

Ethanol definately would fail without some subsidies. To begin with any new fuel competing with oil has to compete against an existing infrastructure.

But the real challenge is competing with oil subsidies. Before The Iraq War, over 1/5th of the Navy budget went to the cost of patrolling the middle east. Duty free imported oil amounts to over a million dollars a day. Tax free income from domestic oil production profits is another couple million dollars a day.

I'm not suggesting we take away the oil subsidies, just pointing out that in order for any fuel to compete it will almost certainly take some subsidies to launch it.

As far as bad business decisions, they're everywhere, especially in the oil prospecting industry. Look at the history of Spectrum 7, or Standard Oil, or Sinclair, or Marathon, or even my favorite, Phillips Petroleum. They've all made mega-million dollar flops. But for every failure there are four success stories.

Feras

iTrader: (1)

yeah bond dissociation energy is the key element of what you're going for here, but combustion isn't the same thing as bond dissociation. Do the stoichometry of the energy released from combustion and complete bond disassociation, very different numbers.

FloppinNachos

you have to take the bond energies of the products and the reactants though. and do something with them, add substract i forget and that's the combustion energy. right?

kartweb

Great answer. It's great to see we have a chemist on board. Its been close to 30 years ago since I worked in the Champion Spark Plug Combustion Analysis Lab, but I spent enough time there to wear out 2 Waukesha Engines. Even in those days we did quite a few tests for the petroleum and automotive engineers for various formulations of fuel.

It looks like the biggest speedbump for the success of ethanol is really the mis-information among the general public.

From a performance perspective ethanol is superior to unleaded gasoline.

From a cost perspective per BTU ethanol (at the current demand) is still less then gasoline. Sure people can argue subsidies and that is valid - except when they neglect the subsidies applied to gasoline.

From an environmental perspective no one can really say which is better or worse. Combustion wise there could be a slight favortism towards ethanol due to a very slightly higher by-product of H2O as opposed to CO2. But on the flip side how do you really quantify all the production, distribution, and storage emissions for ethanol and gasoline? How about the nasty little oil spills? How about the risks of deep drilling in the Gulf of Mexico?

On the flip side when it comes to energy density gasoline whallops ethanol. The majority of the US auto fleet runs fine on gasoline. But that same majority also runs fine on E10, and probably even E15.

If used everywhere in America, E10 would reduce daily import of oil by 800,000 barrels a day.

If E20 were practical for the US fleet we could eliminate our dependence on Middle Eastern oil.

Feras

iTrader: (1)

you can only do that for gaseous reactants at standard conditions, hess' law and all that stuff. and for ethanol and gasoline both are liquids at standard conditions, so the total bond dissociation is not a practical or realistic measure of the energy released. But lets think about what has to happen with those bond energies. another way to go about the thinking of the O in ethanol is to look at the lewis structure, in order to get the oxygen free as a reactant you'd have to break an OH and a single CO bond. I dont remember what the specific energies are for that, but thats energy that is lost and not doing work (hence ethanol's total energy released during combustion is lower than that of gasoline and at the same time also partially explains why alcohol has a high octane rating.) At least i think so from what im remembering, i have to focus on more biological organic chemistry but i enjoy fire too lol.

Feras

iTrader: (1)

speaking of chemists in here, anybody know of a good way to oversaturate an NaCl solution to 6M one of my protocols requires 6M NaCl for DNA extraction and for the life of me i thought NaCl saturates at like 5.5M.

zoom44

im no chemist and im sure im saying the wrong thing buuutttt...

way back in 7th grade when we were needing to oversaturate solutions for crystal growth experiments we heated them.

FloppinNachos

The only thing I can think of is to heat the solution so that 6M of NaCl will dissolve, the NaCl solution graph (solubility Y/ heat Y) is kind of a small linear slope though so it might take a lot of heat to do this.

alnielsen

iTrader: (4)

Every business makes bad decisions and they recover from them. If you are trying to say these companies are gone, you are wrong. For the most part they have merged with other companies. As for Standard Oil (of Indiana, there were several Standard Oils after the monopoly was broken up), it changed it's name to Amoco and later merged with BP. I'm setting in the ex-Amoco Research Center, in the Chicago area, at this moment.

Feras

iTrader: (1)

oh yeah gotta be without heat, since i gotta do the extraction at a certain temp. i'll reread the protocol next week

zoom44

well then you need some kinda chemical catalyst. mix with some other salt maybe? or what about pressurizing it?

kartweb

The only one on that list tahst gone is Spectrum 7.

Georgia8er

Studies vary wildly on net energy production from ethanol. The factors people don't think about such as distillation of the ethanol, fuel for farm equipment, production of fertilizer, etc, have 100 different answers on energy consumption for each of these steps. You can come up with high or low net energy production if you pick and choose, even totally leave out steps.

kartweb

Exactly.

Moreover, various different "studies" that have come up with totally different findings used totally different inputs.

While some subsidies exist, they are mostly in the form of tax relief and again depending on who reports the numbers as they too vary. Just like the numbers for our subsidies of oil.

So the bottom line is how much does ethanol or gasoline cost to produce on a BTU basis?

The clear winner today is ethanol. And going forward its safe to bet gasoline will only go up while ethanol will either remain the same or go down.

Winfree

Here, in grape country, ethanol is an everyday part of the brewer's art. Often a wine is fermented to it's fullest ethanol potential because the government makes the vintner pay higher taxes per bottle.

In France, poorly made lots are collected and recycled for fuel. I think, if we stopped worrying about flavor, and included vine wood which is cut off and burned, but is high in carbohydrates, we could increase our national production of fuel ethanol....

However, I have some concerns with ethanol as fuel: When we get reagent grade ethanol it is 100% alcohol, but as soon as it is exposed to the air, it begins to collect water, and it may pull in enough water that it is barely above 70% alcohol.

All the fuel work is done, I assume, with 100% alcohol - but what about ethanol in fuel mixtures - does it pick up water? Does this have an effect on storage or usage? Would a ethanol -gas fuel become less able to burn, and run engines over time?

Also, gasoline can burn down to CO2 and H2O - but ethanol and toluene, ect. seem to produce aromatic compounds or carbon chains with enough components that you can detect them by smell - are we getting air that is less clean as a product of burning and more clogging for our cats?