I have heard of guys converting since the octane is like running race fuel, much cheaper obviously.
I just read up on a company selling conversion kits for all soers of cars. It plugs in before the injector and keeps the injector open a little longer to compensate for being less efficient than conventional gasoline.
Would this work on a race car? Not sure if our injectors can handle being saturated like that. The duty cycle may kill them. Would it even be legal in SE30? I’m assuming no since it is a modification, but it could make racing a bit cheaper.
Well, I’ve been reading about alternative fuel vehicles for a while, I got a Prius last year, and E85 sounds like a very good alternative.
I read about that conversion kit which costs like $575 and was thinking of installing it in my V8 Land Rover. Unfortunately there is only one gas station that sells E85 in Las Vegas, and it’s totally out of my way, and it’s not a lot cheaper than regular premium gas. Off course it’s a lot cheaper than race gasoline, but the conversion kit will require a lot of extra money, new hoses, new lines, new filter, and even new pump.
I don’t think it’s allowed by the rules as of now, but it could be taken into consideration for next season if racers want to switch to E85, I don’t see any unfair advantage for those running E85 except cost.
I vote yes, I’d love to race an E85 car and display my yellow/green sticker in the car
You cannot take advantage of the Octane without increasing the compression, which you cannot do in an E30 and still be legal.you will have a less efficient car as a result of running E85.
Yellow green sticker eh? Are you aware that in the US, ethanol takes MORE energy to produce than it returns? Yes, it takes MORE gas to make ethanol than if you had just used gas in the first place. Corn lobyists drive govt subsidies, which lowers the cost to ‘reasonable’ but still doesn’t make it a good idea. Now, contries like brazil that can grow sugar cane CAN make it efficient enough. Corn at the moment can’t (it doesn’t store its energy in simple sugars).
FWIW, I work for a solar related company and an immersed in ‘green’ stuff. All the renewables magazines say the same thing: E85 in the US is a retarded idea.
[quote]Yellow green sticker eh? Are you aware that in the US, ethanol takes MORE energy to produce than it returns? Yes, it takes MORE gas to make ethanol than if you had just used gas in the first place. Corn lobyists drive govt subsidies, which lowers the cost to ‘reasonable’ but still doesn’t make it a good idea. Now, contries like brazil that can grow sugar cane CAN make it efficient enough. Corn at the moment can’t (it doesn’t store its energy in simple sugars).
FWIW, I work for a solar related company and an immersed in ‘green’ stuff. All the renewables magazines say the same thing: E85 in the US is a retarded idea.[/quote]
I totally agree with you, and I’m very well aware of the american and brazilian situation. A friend of mine works for FIAT and he was based in Brazil for a few years during the 90’s, and like here it was more expensive to make the ethanol than to use gasoline, but you have to start somewhere. Now they don’t depend on middle-east oil. We can’t just sit and wait for sugar cane to grow, which by the way can be produced in great quantities in Hawaii, but they stopped production.
But we are taking this out of the original context.
Making less HP? I understand you can make more on higher octane by changing timing or compression, but you cannot hurt performance. It is a cheap form of high octane fuel.
Making less HP? I understand you can make more on higher octane by changing timing or compression, but you cannot hurt performance. It is a cheap form of high octane fuel.[/quote]I didn’t say less HP, I said less eficient.
E85 has an octane rating of 105, which is higher than typical commercial gasoline mixtures (octane ratings of 85 to 98); however, it does not burn as efficiently in traditionally-manufactured internal-combustion engines. Additionally, E85 contains less energy per volume as compared to gasoline. Although E85 contains only 72% of the energy on a gallon-for-gallon basis compared to gasoline, experimenters have seen slightly better fuel mileage than the 28% this difference in energy content implies. For example, recent tests by the National Renewable Energy Lab on fleet vehicles owned by the state of Ohio showed about a 25% reduction in mpg comparing E85 operation to reformulated gasoline in the same flexible fuel vehicle. Results compared against a gasoline-only vehicle were essentially the same, about a 25% reduction in volumetric fuel economy with E85.
Until someone invents a microbe or some process that can convert corn’s cellulose there is no hope for corn. That breakthrough could be tomorrow, it could be in 10 years, it could be never. The solar thin-film industry has been waiting for their ‘breakthough’ for well over 20 years. Why start somewhere thats a known net loss? How about you give me dollar after dollar and I’ll keep giving you back $0.95? I’ll vow to figure out how to make it profitable for you eventually;) FWIW, I don’t remember the exact statistic but if you turned EVERY square foot of land in the continantal US to grow corn, you’d only make enough fuel for ~10% of the country. It is simple IMPOSSIBLE to replace fossil fuels in the US w/ corn (or any other single techonolgy for that matter) Algaes have FAR more promise but since there isn’t an ‘algae lobby’, corn’s high-$ lobbists are going to pay-off the politicians…
Ethanol is a great idea. There are present technologies that can produce it efficiently - but not corn. Go subsidize the ones w/ promise, not the ones w/ lobbists.
Yes. Burning a higher octane fuel, given nothing else changes, will result in LESS HP. It is a known, dyno proven, fact that if you run higher octane you’ll loose hp. Reason: A higher octane fuel almost always has a slower flame front propagation and w/o more advance it produces peak cyl pressure too late in the cycle. You’ll make the most power if you find a fast burning fuel (on the verge of detonation)and run as little advance as possible. An E85 conversion kit must include a ‘chip’ as stoich for E100 is 9 (vs 14.7 for gas). So, you either have to mess w/ fuel pressure, injection times, or bigger injectors to get the reqd extra fuel into the cyls to keep from going lean. You’d also want to add advance to counteract its higher oct. Now, there is a hidden advantage to Exx. Its latent heat of evap is >2x that of gas (it cools the intake more). Not as important w/ NA vehicles but is a big help w/ turbos. A smaller turbocharged engine should be able to take advantage of that fact to be more efficient than a comparable hp gas engine.
