In quest for greater efficiency in ICE's ethanol (& methanol) could provide a much needed boost

[Bill USA]

http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/alcoholengines.aspx

If a 650 horsepower IndyCar Series race car can run on 100 percent ethanol, without compromising performance or safety, so can a personal automobile or truck. Forget any negative criticisms you may have heard about corn ethanol and listen to the truth—Alcohol is a better fuel than gasoline.

100% alcohol is a superior fuel for spark ignition internal combustion engines; but only if the engine is optimized to run on alcohol. The flex-fuel E-85 cars and trucks available today have gasoline engines that are not optimized to use alcohol.

[font color="blue"]“The Flex-Fuel Vehicles (FFVs) produced today, use fairly typical gasoline engines, which, because they must retain dual-fuel capability, are not able to take full advantage of the favorable combustion characteristics of alcohols.
“Engines optimized for alcohol fuel use, on the other hand, may yield efficiencies that exceed that of state-of-the-art diesel engines—or, about one third higher than that of FFV engines. In earlier engine research at EPA with neat [100%] methanol and ethanol, for example, over 40% brake thermal efficiency was achieved over a relatively broad range of loads and speeds, with peak levels reaching over 42%. Similar work has also been performed with E85, yielding up to 20% fuel economy improvement over baseline gasoline engines.”[/font]

Economical, High-Efficiency Engine Technologies for Alcohol Fuels size: 134 Kb - 10 pages
— By Matthew Brusstar, U.S. EPA National Vehicle and Fuel Emissions Laboratory, and Marco Bakenhus, FEV Engine Technology, Inc.

Ethanol Engine efficiency exceeds gasoline engines, giving greater miles per gallon (MPG) with ethanol fuel:
High Efficiency and Low Emissions from a Port-Injected Engine with Alcohol Fuels
— By Matthew Brusstar, Mark Stuhldreher, David Swain and William Pidgeon, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency size: 70 Kb - 7 pages
(more)

[corkhead]

1. Interesting reading. I was unaware of how engines designed for alcohol operate more efficiently

than gasoline engines can.

[hunter]

2. By this standard DME in a diesel engine is even better.

Volvo Trucks to begin limited production of DME heavy-duty trucks in NA in 2015; customer trials; Oberon partnership
June 07, 2013

At an event in Sacramento, California, Volvo Trucks announced that it will commercialize dimethyl ether (DME)-powered heavy-duty commercial vehicles in North America, with limited production beginning in 2015. Volvo also revealed ongoing customer field testing of DME trucks in the US (with Safeway and Martin Transportation), as well as its partnership in the customer trials with startup DME producer Oberon Fuels. Oberon Fuels is the first company to announce plans to commercialize DME fuel production in North America.

DME offers diesel-quality performance with a high cetane number and low auto-ignition temperature, but burns cleanly without producing any soot. It is non-toxic, non-carcinogenic, and can be made from a variety of sustainable domestic sources, as well as from North America’s abundant supply of natural gas. The carbon intensity of the DME will vary with the feedstock, but with the use of bio-gas (biomethane) from an anaerobic digester as input into the Oberon process, DME can provide up to a 95% CO2 reduction compared to diesel. Volvo has been testing Bio-DME in Sweden since 2009.

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2013/06/dme-20130607.html

The problem with methanol is it's so damned corrosive; it eats many metals and plastics and it interferes with lubrication. Los Angeles experimented with methanol buses in the late 'eighties and early nineties but abandoned them because of maintenance problems.