Thread: Sugar cane e85 fuel at Rozelle cheap but at cost to car

Originally Posted by JDNSW

.....

The other point that needs to be noted is that ethanol contains less energy per litre than does petrol, around 10% from memory, and unless you have an engine whose ecu takes advantage of the higher octane rating of the ethanol blend, then you can expect worse economy (as well as less power), and this erodes the apparent fuel saving. ....
John

I looked it up - ethanol contains 34% less energy than petrol, so E85 contains about 30% less, and everything being equal, maximum power and fuel economy will decrease by this amount. If the ECU can adjust the ignition timing and boost using a knock sensor, you can get some of this back, but this factor needs to be kept in mind when looking at the price of ethanol fuels.

John

Blasphemy! I ain't got no Holden crap in my Landie!

Originally Posted by dobbo

That the low cost of an old holden straight six, you could replace the engine every few months and still make a profit.

This is all very interesting. One of the V8 Supercar teams, Triple Eight Racing, have been doing tests with E85, as they intend to run next years championship using it. With limited testing, and of course the race team being reasonably tight lipped, I suppose you can't take too much from the information they are giving out. But.......they say they are not losing much in performance. But at what cost would be interesting to know, especially as everyone says you use more fuel for distance travelled.

I presume the whole championship will be run using E85 by all the teams next year.

Originally Posted by numpty

This is all very interesting. One of the V8 Supercar teams, Triple Eight Racing, have been doing tests with E85, as they intend to run next years championship using it. With limited testing, and of course the race team being reasonably tight lipped, I suppose you can't take too much from the information they are giving out. But.......they say they are not losing much in performance. But at what cost would be interesting to know, especially as everyone says you use more fuel for distance travelled.

I presume the whole championship will be run using E85 by all the teams next year.

Ethanol is quoted at 104 octane, so a substantial increase in effective compression ratio is possible, with consequent improvement in power and fuel consumption, and it is probably possible with a bit of tinkering to take advantage of other properties of alcohol to wring a bit more power out of an engine.

John

Originally Posted by Brian Hjelm

Well, I will speak from the point of view of preparation of a methanol fuelled car, speedway midgets in particular. Methanol and Ethanol are pretty much identical I think. JD may offer some professional insight here. Methanol against motor spirit, you require about a 2:1 mixture of methanol to air by weight to give correct mixture. Methanol runs better when a rich mixture, so a bit of an increase of fuel volume is good. General rule? An increase in jet area of 1.6:1 is required. 1 being the jet area of a motor spirit fuelled vehicle. You also need a fuel supply system capable of supplying the extra fuel. Pump, fuel lines, needle aperture, float bowl, carburettor passages, as well as jet size. If the Rozelle shop is selling 85% ethanol then a considerable amount of modification and tuning would normally be necessary to use the stuff. My speedway fuel was usually Shell A which I got free. From memory this stuff is about 92-94% methanol. The rest is some 100 octane Avgas, some lubricating oil, some benzol or nitrobenzole. The Avgas is used to dissolve the lube oil to a form which will dissolve in methanol and is needed to lubricate valve stems as the methanol washes the oil off them. You will have to ask an oil company chemist what the benzol is for. Methanol burns slower so a lot more ignition advance is required. Offy midgets used about 30-35 degrees initial advance and being a pure racing engine had no vacuum or centrifugal advance. Could be a bitch to push start on a track with poor traction.

Running so rich also produced problems with unburnt fuel getting into the engine oil. I used to drain the oil immediately after every meeting and test it for fuel and water(methanol is hygroscopic). also used to drain the fuel and hook up a can of motor spirit and pump it through until all methanol was purged from the fuel system. This prevented corrosion.

From the above you can guess that I am not enamoured of the prospect of having to use alcohol fuel in my daily driver.

Ditto your comments...

Speedway was where I used to sling spanners too....

Methanol required flushing from the lines/carb every meet..

The stuff is hygroscopic and turns to jelly....

And it burns like buggery in your eyes.. I had the cleanest sinuses

Brazil has had MANY MANY issues with the fuel, it hates alloy.....

I would never choose to run it in my daily vehicles.

Originally Posted by Brian Hjelm

Well, I will speak from the point of view of preparation of a methanol fuelled car, speedway midgets in particular. Methanol and Ethanol are pretty much identical I think. JD may offer some professional insight here. Methanol against motor spirit, you require about a 2:1 mixture of methanol to air by weight to give correct mixture. Methanol runs better when a rich mixture, so a bit of an increase of fuel volume is good. General rule? An increase in jet area of 1.6:1 is required. 1 being the jet area of a motor spirit fuelled vehicle. You also need a fuel supply system capable of supplying the extra fuel. Pump, fuel lines, needle aperture, float bowl, carburettor passages, as well as jet size. If the Rozelle shop is selling 85% ethanol then a considerable amount of modification and tuning would normally be necessary to use the stuff. My speedway fuel was usually Shell A which I got free. From memory this stuff is about 92-94% methanol. The rest is some 100 octane Avgas, some lubricating oil, some benzol or nitrobenzole. .... .... .. ... .
.

I could benefit from someone refreshing my memory on this subject. I forget what form of alcohol we used.
My experience with using alcohol for fuel goes back over 30 years.
At the time I was racing a Maico 125 in the NSW Short Circuit Championships.. I came third that year.
I think we bought it as Shell A and that it was purple in colour.
The reason we used it was because it gave a significant increase in power.
My recollection was that the correct mixture required twice as much fuel as a petrol mixture and that the loss of power from a slightly rich mixture was negligible, unlike with petrol.
In fact with an air cooled two stroke, it was probably better to get the slight cooling effect of a slightly rich mixture because of the way a two stroke loses power as it gets hot.
I remember that because of that it was so simple to retune the carby for the alcohol. All I did was run a drill through the main jet and file an extra notch in the needle to lift it a few millimetres . The drill was 40% bigger diameter because that gave 100% more fuel. It wasn't even necessary to touch the idle jet or the cutaway on the slide.

I also ran a Honda SL125 on alcohol and got a substantial increase in power over petrol.

(Yes I know the SL125 was described by one motorcycle magazine as the perfect bike to buy for your girlfriend to learn to ride. Another magazine said that based on the asumption that the more power you extracted from an engine, the faster it wore out, the SL125 should last forever because it produced no power at all. Mind you, can you name another motor that is redlined at 9,000 rpm and has a torque curve that never falls below 94% of maximum torque anywhere between 3 and 9,000rpm?)

Anyway back to alcohol.
I increased the stroke to take the capacity to 145cc and resleeved the barrel to take a 305 Honda sleeve with a 750 Honda piston to take the capacity to 175cc.
With the standard head it now had a torque curve like an electric motor. It seemed that if it was running it was producing maximum torque. Mind you it ran out of breath at about 5 or 6,000rpm, so I fitted at webcam so now it had a torque curve like a steam engine.

I used to run it at weekend races on alcohol with a compression ratio of 13:1 and found it had more power and certainly more useable power than bikes that were supposed to produce twice the power mine had started with.

I tried 16:1 and it went even better, but I then had trouble keeping head gaskets intact.

I remember clearly that my fuel bill for a weekend's racing jumped from 30 cents to $1.80 because I used twice as much and it was three times the price.

I have no idea what would have happened if I had left the fuel in the tank because with both bikes, I had to retune them to ride the bikes to work on petrol on Monday morning. With the Honda that involved swapping the main jet, dropping the needle and pulling the engine out to remove the head and barrel to replace the piston with a lower compression one - about an hour's work.

Anyway the point is (yes there is a point to all this) it gave a substantial increase in power and was incredibly easy to retune the carby.

Shell A was dyed purple as an identifier like yellow for standard petrol and red for super petrol (and green for Brisbane City Council petrol!!!!!).

Methanol is quite sensitive to lean mixtures and will cause extensive engine damage when run lean. You can run it so rich, however, that unburnt fuel is almost dribbling out the exhaust pipewithout notable effect on performance. Many speedway cars were running rich to take advantage of the cooling effect and the fuel was still burning in the exhaust pipes. Turbo Offys actually had the cooling effect, latent heat of evaporation, designed in. Ford used some influence & financial muscle to get a fuel consumption formula introduced into Indy racing when they could not beat the turbo Offys with their four cam V8's. Methanol can withstand very high compression ratios. My Repco-Holden was 14:1 and my Offy midget was 16:1. Barry Wixted says his Offy is 17:1.

Originally Posted by Brian Hjelm

Well, I will speak from the point of view of preparation of a methanol fuelled car, speedway midgets in particular. Methanol and Ethanol are pretty much identical I think. JD may offer some professional insight here. Methanol against motor spirit, you require about a 2:1 mixture of methanol to air by weight to give correct mixture. Methanol runs better when a rich mixture, so a bit of an increase of fuel volume is good. General rule? An increase in jet area of 1.6:1 is required. 1 being the jet area of a motor spirit fuelled vehicle. You also need a fuel supply system capable of supplying the extra fuel. Pump, fuel lines, needle aperture, float bowl, carburettor passages, as well as jet size. If the Rozelle shop is selling 85% ethanol then a considerable amount of modification and tuning would normally be necessary to use the stuff. My speedway fuel was usually Shell A which I got free. From memory this stuff is about 92-94% methanol. The rest is some 100 octane Avgas, some lubricating oil, some benzol or nitrobenzole. The Avgas is used to dissolve the lube oil to a form which will dissolve in methanol and is needed to lubricate valve stems as the methanol washes the oil off them. You will have to ask an oil company chemist what the benzol is for. Methanol burns slower so a lot more ignition advance is required. Offy midgets used about 30-35 degrees initial advance and being a pure racing engine had no vacuum or centrifugal advance. Could be a bitch to push start on a track with poor traction.

Running so rich also produced problems with unburnt fuel getting into the engine oil. I used to drain the oil immediately after every meeting and test it for fuel and water(methanol is hygroscopic). also used to drain the fuel and hook up a can of motor spirit and pump it through until all methanol was purged from the fuel system. This prevented corrosion.

From the above you can guess that I am not enamoured of the prospect of having to use alcohol fuel in my daily driver.

Spot on,

My experience was with Mini Sprints and straight Methanol from CSR.

PITA as far as tuning goes, 2mm jets in the webber carbs for a 1200cc datto engine, I cant remember what advance we ran but we had to modify a dizzy for more advance.

We ran stainless fittings and nylon tubing on the fuel system, a Holley blue fuel pump which was modified for more flow, a large truck fuel filter and modified (reemed and custom made) needles and seats as well as floats.

If you were to run a car on it all the time you would need to run a completly sealed system to make sure you didnt get water in the fuel as I would think that most of the problems that people have had with it in the past would have had to do with corrosion caused by water e.g. rusted out fuel rails and rough running etc.