geniushanbiao

I'm not seeing in your posted chart any comparison between E85 and other fuel after the tuning so this cannot prove its a superior fuel. When you tune an engine it certainly gives out higher power due to the fact that stock tuning is always very conservative to compensate for engine life. You need to compare between the fuels to conclude superiority.

When you talk about fuel there are many aspect we can talk about, but as for superiority it's almost solely the burning value (or heat value) that determines. Ethanol has heat value of 29.7 MJ/kg or 23.4 MJ/m^3, while gasoline has 46.4 MJ/kg or 34.2 MJ/m^3. Clearly ethanol has lower heat value than gasoline so gasoline is better that's a no brainer. The reason we dope ethanol is to reduce the use of crude oil so we can use it longer, not because ethanol is better. Ethanol doped gasoline can still give high output if you trade off more gas mileage. Also the tuning ceiling of E85 will be lower than E10 on the same engine.

geniushanbiao

Well actually I just found the comparison. With the stage I tune the maximum HP measured with gasoline is at least 357 hp but with E85 it max out at 313 hp how can you say it's a superior fuel?

Audi Junkie

Let me help you with the data...

Audi Junkie

I don't think you understand why ethanol is used as a gasoline additive. Because if you did, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Your fallback argument of energy density is meaningless in every aspect except maybe in regards to vehicle range capability. Possibly a few more miles on a tank of denser gas or dirty diesel fuel.... verses perfectly clean running fuel with tremendous power, no thanks.

Again, if range on a tank of fuel is your penultimate goal, kudos.

Zuffen

The big benefit of E85 is you can squeeze more power out of an engine with stand alone tuning than you can with E10 or Gasoline.

if you're a horsepower junkie you will accept the 30% increase in fuel consumption for the additional horsepower it releases.

If you're into drag racing or similar there are real advantages to E85.

Personally I wouldn't run it on the street (due to the consumption rate) but certainly would if I was chasing max power from a turbo or supercharged engine on a track. Normally aspirated can benefit but not to the same extent.

Audi Junkie

Fuel consumption is a non-issue. People thinking in miles-per-gallon should be thinking miles-per-dollar

I have a M112 full Flex Fuel at my Florida home, so I get to test these fuels on the highway in a "neutral" non-turbo engine.

E85 costs 20% less than 93, but then gives -10% worse MPG, a net +10% gain.

In the tuned turbos, it compares to race gas for less $ than regular gas, and it cleans out the engine nicely.

For non-Flex engines, a gallon or two perks up a tank of gas nicely w/o running lean. This is because it's 105-110 octane. That's why it's mixed in regular gas 10%, as an octane booster. Again, it cleans the tank, lines and engine internals nicely, a cleaning additive and octane booster than costs nothing because it replaces a gallon of gas. It scavenges water out of the system.

The trick of alcohol power is it's high evaporative cooling effect, which takes the charge temp down under high boost. Stratified mode injection systems fire direct injectors up to 11 times (in MB) per combustion cycle, stirring and cooling inside the cylinder during combustion.

Zuffen

Half your luck.

E85 cost a lot more the 98 Octane in Australia.

Very few people use it and it's available at less than 1% of service stations.

geniushanbiao

As a scientist in Engineering, I know what I'm talking about on this topic. Like I said superiority of fuel has a lot of aspects you need to talk about, not just those meaningless power curves.

First of all, your claim of "perfectly clean" on ethanol shows your lack of knowledge in science. Ethanol might be slightly cleaner than gasoline and diesel, but it's not a clean fuel either. It contains carbon in the molecules so it generates carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, just like gasoline and diesel. If you don't know about it, just a recap of some high school chemistry, carbon monoxide is toxious and carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. And for the "dirty" gas or diesel, please go learn some basic science. If you look at the major pollutants from internal combustion engines (ICE), they are carbon monoxide, SO2, NOx and soot. Among those, SO2 is probably the only one that you can claim ethanol "cleaner" than gas and diesel. It's not because the fuel itself is better, but the refinery process cannot get rid of all sulfur content from the gas or diesel, not because they naturally have sulfur in the molecules. If you go with biodiesel there would be virtually no sulfur content, where the Europeans have implemented for long. Carbon monoxide is a byproduct from ANY fuel with carbon in the molecules, so the only exception would be hydrogen. NOx is produced by ANY internal combustion engine REGARDLESS of the type of fuel. It's from the reaction between nitrogen and oxygen and solely dependent on the combustion chamber temperature. Soot is the dirty part of those OLD diesel engines but today's diesel vehicles have DPF that can capture more than 99% of the soot it produced. So in general, your ethanol-powered engine also produces carbon monoxide and NOx, even if you use E100 instead of E85.

The ONLY clean fuel we know so far is HYDROGEN, the most superior fuel we can have access to. It's 100% clean, doesn't produce any carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide, and theoretically can generate higher power than ANY OTHER COMBUSTION FUEL you can find, including your favorate ethanol. There are some hydrogen powered cars but right now engineers are in favor of fuel cell over ICE on hydrogen power, which is similar to those lithium-based EVs but apparently lithium-based EVs are better in a lot of aspects.

As of your statment of "why ethanol is used as a gasoline additive", first of all ethanol is NOT a "qualified" gasoline additive at all, at least from a scientific perspect of view. The use of E10 is mainly for economic reason since there's mass production of ethanol from farm waste corn and they need to find ways to sell them, plus they are very cheap. The only benefit of adding ethanol to fuel would be a slightly reduced carbon monoxide emission, but with today's catalytic converters this benefit is almost neglegible. On the other hand you need to consider the problems with ethanol fuel, including the corrosive ethanol fuel eating up rubber gaskets. That's why engines need to be completely redesigned to accommodate for fuels with higher portion of ethanol, not simply a tuning like what you did.

geniushanbiao

Higher fuel consumption also means you need to fill up the tank more frequently. It's not a problem for people just playing around or doing road trips or track driving, but for working class this IS an issue. I used to have a 94 Mercury Sable with the 3.8L Essex engine that eats a lot of gas from the little 16 gallon tank so I had to basically top up the tank 2-3 times a week. I know how that feels, definitely unpleasant and waste of time.

Audi Junkie

lol, this thread is hilarious. You did nothing to advance your contention, other than to TRY to point out that hydrogen is a better fuel, even though you made no reference to power density, portability, storage, production....lol. You make it out to be a fantasy fuel, except overlooking MANY various flaws. Think about it, there's a reason hydrogen is n/a for a vehicle fuel. There's not even a legit argument going about this....so I will skip the details.

What kind of title is "scientist in Engineering" anyway? It's not impressing anyone, neither is your "high school chemistry" lesson. Stupid statements like "ethanol isn't a gasoline additive" doesn't help your lame argument. You simply have no understanding of fuels. Dunning-Kruger effect is in FULL effect. Knowing when to quit is the only strategy when you are on the wrong side of a discussion.

Filling up more often is the only factor in-play. Going to that argument shows how weak the rest of your case is. If I offered 99% of people here +60tq and +40hp with the caveat they have to fill up once or two more a year....most people would take it without a thought. Except you are over-thinking it, and putting it on display.

LAME.

Audi Junkie

Really dude, you need to stop pretending to be an automotive engineer, or even a propulsion engineer.

geniushanbiao

lol you provided nothing useful other than personally attacking me because you are feeling offended. I do research in the department of engineering of University that's what it means by "scientist in engineering". I have many publications in world-class top-tier journals and they have been cited more than 200 times. You won't know that if you only have high school education and have no experience in research.

Regarding our argument, I'm only using hydrogen as an EXAMPLE to make you aware that your ethanol or ethanol-blended gasoline is never a "clean fuel". And if you talk to any scientist in automobile research, they will tell you the same thing that hydrogen is the best fuel possible to power automobiles, but the generation and storage is a big challenge that's absolutely true.

Adding ethanol to gasoline, or use ethanol itself as fuel, have pros and cons, and in my opinion the cons are more than the pros. For pros, it increases the octane rating and cleans the engine a little better, as well as reducing emission a little. However there are also many cons associated including reduced fuel longevity, more prone to contamination, corrosive to seals and hoses, etc. The pros of blending ethanol into gasoline ARE NOT the incentives of adding them, but like I said the price was the main reason of such blend. If you look at the development of such fuel, it all started in 1970s when petroleum-based fuel became expensive and environmental concerns regarding the leaded gasoline. The leaded gasoline additive was actually solved by using MMT or Toluene (or other antiknock agents). Ethanol can also serve as antiknock agent, however you need to understand that adding ethanol into the fuel to make E10 is not for such reason. That's simply because using ethanol as antiknock is a more loss than gain option if you consider the side effects it causes to the engine. The use of ethanol is SOLELY an economic consideration. I understand that it's a little difficult for you to understand, but all you need to know is that ethanol is by nature not a good choice of fuel for ICE. The reason that we are blending ethanol into gasoline is the increasing price of gasoline/decreasing stock on earth, and the cheap price and vast source of ethanol. Scientists and engineers have worked very hard in the past 40 years or so to make our car engines able to work well with those ethanol-blended gasoline you might not be aware of.

Your tuning is good I'm not questioning on that. Your claim on the superiority and cleanness of ethanol over gasoline is the argument. It looks like you just made a statement against yourself by saying I didn't mention power density, portability, storage, production. As a matter of fact your tuning and test results only showed a better power output, on that specific engine, of ethanol over gasoline, and you are trying to claim that ethanol is superior to gasoline while you never mentioned about other factors. Also you claimed ethanol is "perfectly clean" in your previous post (go check it), which I pointed out that it's completely wrong.

geniushanbiao

I'm not an automotive engineer, but as a researcher I know how to read papers and interpret data, instead of making incorrect conclusion with the result from an incomplete experiment/tune.

Audi Junkie

Another thing you keep getting wrong. Ethanol is more expensive than CHEAP gasoline. That's why it's government subsidized to compete with gas.

It's still a better fuel than gasoline.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunnin...3Kruger_effect

geniushanbiao

Show me how you concluded ethanol is more expensive. From whatever I read, ethanol is cheaper. It used to be more expensive than gas 20 years ago due to supply but that's long gone.

Probably you can say E85 is more expensive if you use the MPG/BTU adjusted price to compare. The E85 fuel has much less energy density than gasoline so although the per gallon price is lower, the per MJ(or BTU) price is higher.

Audi Junkie

Ethanol is subsidized bro. Don't you understand what that means? The price at the pump is lower than the actual cost of production, the govt takes up the slack.

Again, please stop lecturing people with scatterbrained concepts. Ethanol pumps out of the underground tank where you already get gas, it mixes fine with gasoline, it burns way cleaner and produces way more power....and oh, it's slightly cheaper for the consumer. The big thing is that it runs in the engine you already have. I don't think you'll be able to overcome those facts, so why are you trying? Maybe spend your time retrofitting your car to burn hydrogen, see how that works out for you.

geniushanbiao

OK what you are saying is right that right now ethanol is actually more expensive than gasoline, but what I'm saying is that the original idea of adding ethanol to gasoline was that ethanol was expected to be much cheaper than gasoline since it's generated from food waste.

Let me get the whole story straight. The original plan of blending ethanol from scientists was actually based on the idea of generating the ethanol from food WASTE, like the stalks, leaves, etc. From this end, the production cost should be much lower than gasoline as we don't actually need to pay for the raw material, and the price of gasoline was going up in 1970s. The govt took this idea at the beginning and started to incentive farms to start producing ethanol using corns from late 1970s. However, things didn't go as expected. Later research show that the ethanol generated from waste might be much more harmful than that generated from raw corn or sugar cane. So most ethanol producing farms simply use raw corn to produce ethanol, that basically lead to significantly higher cost in production because they had to put the cost of the raw corn into the calculation. Also people are criticizing that the ethanol biofuel industry is fighting with the food industry for corn and a lot of scientists nowadays are calling to reduce or stop the producting of ethanol fuel due to several concerns including this one. But the govt has already been deep into it so they can't turn back. That's why they keep adding subsidies into it and also put out regulations to mandate the use of ethanol in gasoline fuel. If you look at those subsidies you will find that they added several after 2010, while before that they had only a couple of them.

Also another thing you want to keep in mind is that ethanol is a "secondary fuel", while gasoline is "primary fuel". The difference translates to the usage that you need to put all pollutions and energy cost together from production to consumption to evaluate the cleanness and energy efficiency. Work from David Pimentel (A Cornell professor) showed that we actually need to spend more energy to produce ethanol than what it can give out, which results in "net loss". This didn't even take into consideration the cost and pollution of farm equipment to grow the corn. Yes the burning process of ethanol is slightly more clean than burning gasoline, but if you take into consideration the production part, ethanol will be no better. You can't justify the cleanness simply by looking at the part that you use the fuel. Similarly the current EVs are not "clean" as well. The use of EV itself emits zero emission, which some EV fans like Elon Musk uses it to trick customers into buying it, however the pollution associated with the life cycle of lithium-ion batteries might be even worse than the pollution caused by burning fossil fuel. Scientists have compared them and found that gasoline cars and EVs both produce substantial amount of pollution. It's not easy to compare them but at least EVs are no better than ICE vehicles.

Thank you for your suggestion, but if you understand what I talked about in the last paragraph, you will know that hydrogen is not an ideal fuel for industry either. Similar to ethanol, hydrogen is also a type of secondary fuel that's subject to the same rule.

With today's technology, gasoline/diesel/biodiesel/kerosene are still the best types of fuel we have access to. Bio-ethanol from food is an OK alternative to gasoline. Nuclear fuel is also good but mainly for power plants and navy ships.

Audi Junkie

Better late than never.

DomiNOOCH

This conversation was very interesting and really quite informative but after all was said and done I'm still left with one question.

Let me explain.....I'm from South Carolina and we have available to us 100% gasoline (no ethanol). Are there any benefits to running ethanol free gas on a routine basis?
It should also be noted my wife and I drive 2015 MB ML350 flex fuel.....vehicle has never run on E85 fuel (always use 93 Octane) but after reading this dialog I'm curious about fueling in the opposite direction of this discussion !!!

Audi Junkie

The reason 10% ethanol is added to gas is it's a octane booster. So generally non-ethanol gas is low octane, making it unsuitable for high compression engines, like the 3.5.
Even in an engine that runs on 87, there's no benefit AT ALL. The only purpose to non-ethanol is for boat engines mfg before 1978 or so, and classic cars that have fuel lines made of plastics.

If you have access to E85, by all means use it. It doesn't require the nasty additives gas uses to run clean. It's 105+ octane and it clean up the engine and fuel system nicely. Cost is about 20% lower than super gas and it returns about 10% lower mpg, a net gain. Remember to calculate in $ per mile, not MPG. In my Flex Fuel C240 no turbo, and in my turbo GLA they both run best on about half gas half E85. You could even run regular 87 + E85, but in a turbo 93+E85 is better.

geniushanbiao

The only case pure gasoline benefits would be if you have a vehicle or small engine (farm equipment, lawn mower, etc) that was produced when pure gasoline was the market norm. Those old engines are designed to run with pure gasoline and by using E10 without proper modification you will notice a serious power drop and it also affects longevity. With newer engines designed to work with E10, there's no benefit to run pure gasoline at all.

By the way, pure gasoline has a longer shelf life compared to E10 (6 months vs 3 months) so it might benefit your lawn mower if you are planning to let it sit there for a few months.

chassis

Folks, ethanol is not added to improve anything automotive-related. Ethanol is added to gasoline because of an extreme surplus of corn (maize) production in the US. Uses for corn are desired by those engaged in the production of corn (megafarms, lobbies and politicians).

If the US did not have a surplus of corn production, ethanol would not be used in gasoline. Read about the prevalence of ethanol in vehicle fuel in parts of the world with low corn production.

It's about economics and politics, not automotive performance.

geniushanbiao

You are absolutely right on the original idea of adding ethanol. Although scientifically ethanol serves as a great anti-knock additive as well as detergent, it was introduced when leaded gasoline was being used so anti-knock was not that much incentive at all. Another reason to add ethanol was that when we started to realize the problem of depletion of fossil fuel sooner or later, we wanted to do something to slow this process down and blending those bio-fuel in seems a good idea.

chassis

Yes, and now that the world has more oil than it ever could have dreamed of 20 years ago, it's time to eliminate ethanol from motor fuels. But then there are the vested interests...

And here come electric vehicles...

Time to eliminate ethanol from motor fuels.