Bio-ethanol

[angel]

I had heard some years ago that some european countries (Sweden, for sure, and Netherlands maybe?) had started making E85 (85% bio-ethanol, the rest petrol) available to motorists. A lot of vehicles, including 2CVs and R4s have been using E85 since then.
That kind of fuel is no newcomer, it had been available for many years in Brazil (up to 100% ethanol) and the United States, too.
But what puzzled me, was this one: http://www.franzose.de/de/News/PaName-E10-der-stark-diskutierte-Kraftstoff-Wir-sagen-Haende-weg- , and also a discussion with a customer (Triumph owner), who told me that in the UK, where pure petrol has been replaced with E5 (and soon E10), a lot of British classics owners are having trouble with plastic and rubber parts disintegrating from not being compatible with ethanol...
So I searched the French R4 club forum and found this one: http://www.r4-4l.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=7010&p=10 . As far as I can understand, besides E85 being widely available in France, their main problem is fine tuning the R4 engines to E85...absolutely no compatibility problems.

So my question is, why should our fuel system parts be incompatible with 5% or 10% ethanol, while holding up well with 85% ethanol?
Has anyone among us any experience with E85 on an R4? I would be very interested to run an R4 on E85, when, and if, this kind of fuel will be available in my country.

 

[Azazello]

Do you think alcohol will ever be a serious alternative to petrol?

 

[angel]

From an engineer's point of view, it could be (take Brazil as an example, they are using it on a very large scale since the 70s). Any petrol engine can run on alcohol without major modifications.

I would like to see alcohol replacing petrol, but I think it has some serious consequences that we should first look at. Bio-ethanol is produced mainly from sugar-beet crops, and other similar vegetables. This means, that as ethanol use on cars becomes more popular, we will need to have larger crops and we will end up needing large field areas to "cultivate" our automotive fuel. This may mean that fields normally used for feeding people will be converted to produce the much-needed ethanol, and it's not hard to guess it is going to happen in the Third World countries...
Not to mention eventual damage to the land from over-cultivation, or sudden price increase of areas that are useful for ethanol production...I think it will cause a lot of social imbalance, if not handled carefully.

 

[Azazello]

Precisely what I was thinking about.
An old collegue of mine (a young guy indeed, but no more collegue) was a great fan of alcohol as a substitute of petrol, and modified his old fiat Uno carburettor to use alcohol.
He was used to buy the red alcohol, the one for domestic use, leave it under the sun to let the color go away, and then use it in his car.
He went ahead this way for several thousand km, then stopped and began using petrol and gpl again, because alcohol was not so cheap, uncomfortable to buy and, last but not least, it was the period of terroristic attacks and he feels not so secure to be seen with 50 liters of alcohol in a supermarket.
But it works well, and he tried to convince me to have a second carburettor from a scrapyard to enlarge the giglet hole and go with alcohol with my r4...
Never tried.

 

[Azazello]

I read the cultivation of sugar cane or mais to produce bioethanol is not sustainable, but someone is searching a way to extract sugars to ferment from wood, via some strains of microorganisms, so a well planned foresting method would give more chance to achieve in the quest; wood is made of cellulose, all sugar if you can use it. Great quantities but still not useable (chemically requires more energy than it can produce, but using living microorganisms...).
I am still skeptical, all this stories seems to me that are told us not to lower our consumptions even knowing petrol is ending...

 

[reidalpine]

waking up a sleeping horse here...On our way to Thenay in France I accidentally filled
98Ron/oct with a 10%blend of ethanol.Seems they are launching this mixture on petrolstations on the Autoroute first.
-What I discovered was that Roffens 1289cc 810motor ran at approx 8-10* higher temp. wasn't exactly sluggish but felt somewhat sleepy,also consumption went up-didn't measure it but it was certainly noticeable!
-when filled up with Proper petrol run again cooler and felt normal again.
What puzzles me a bit re.above is that the motor ran hotter than normal-whilst I would have guessed the "alcohol-content" in the mix would act more efficiently as a cooling-agent and also would wash away the oil-film from moving parts?? could it wash away the film to such an extent that friction-heat goes up ??
so what do I decuct out of this? First: fill at "local" petr.station.Be sure you get the unblended fuel. I can't see any harm done if filled once in a blue moon,but as reported rubber-lines/O-rings/carb.membrane etc WILL get damaged over time by using this stuff-Also if filled up and stored (over winter or longer period etc) this stuff WILL mean your tank (and exhaust-system)rusts out much faster as ethanol accumulates and stores water at an alarming rate in comparison to ordinary petrol....-even if the modern petrol is way worse than the stuff they pushed only a few years ago-There is now NO stabilizers in the petrol,so old wisdom of filling tank to the brim b4 storage is no longer valid.Best is to completely empty the tank b4 storing.
-As we have longer winter up here I try to use up whats in the tank,when down to 4-5 liters I pour in a deciliter of 2-stroke oil to "lubricate" the inside of the tank and exhaust-system (you can buy smoke-free 2-stroke oil so no blue smoke from ex.pipe these last few kms either)(Or-you could say it's the new Renault-Diesel in there!) -R.

 

[stork]

An acquaintance of mine that helps me maintain my Mercedes benz is from Brazil and gave me a short on the Ethanol story in Brazil. Here is his answer:

"Hi Robert,

We have been officially running ethanol powered cars since 1979, in fact my stepfather who lives on LA now worked in the early development of ethanol technology back in the mid 70's.

In the beginning cars were very difficult to start in the morning especially in cold weather and Ford actually had the best system where a pump would inject gasoline stored in an auxiliary reservoir automatically for the car to start and then you would drive off with the chocked pulled, sputtering like crazy until the engine was up to temp... very interesting times. Up until 1988-89 95% of all new cars sold in the country were ethanol powered, in fact you had to special order a new vehicle if you wanted gas as your main fuel!

Carburators suffered, so did fuel tanks and pumps because of the corrosive properties of alcohol.

Unfortunately politicians and lobbyists got in the way and by the mid 90's there were almost no more ethanol powered cars, basically only taxi cabs were using the fuel but technology evolved and finally in the early 2000's flex fuel technology became a reality and today practically 100% of all new cars are flex-fuel so ethanol became very popular again. As long as its price is up to 70% that of gasoline, it makes financial sense.

I am just giving you a little background on how things developed in Brazil as far as ethanol being a feasible alternative to gasoline. I believe it to be the best solution to replace oil as the main energy source for cars, buses, tractors, etc... it pollutes less, is 100% renewable, gives you more power, etc... fuel consumption is 30% higher but I don't think that can offset its advantages.

For many years our gas has had between 25 and 30% ethanol mixed in.

The main problems with our old MB's are:

1) Early fuel pump failure
2) Fuel distributor problems in the case of K-Jet cars
3) Bad fuel pressure regulators
4) Lower exhaust system life
5) More frequent fuel injector replacements

Carburated cars suffer less because there are less components in the fuel system to be damaged.

We've had to deal with these issues for may years now so we kind of know what to expect.

It is theoretically possible to convert our cars to run on 100% ethanol but that requires a pretty thorough study on what parameters to change, spark plugs with a different heat range, different carburator jetting and/or fuel injection adjustments, distributor advance, perhaps new camshaft timing, etc...

Modern rubber can take ethanol pretty well and MB has done a pretty good job of protecting the fuel system against corrosion, in fact if you look in the EPC the current p/n for 4A1 floats is already set up for use with ethanol.

Hope this helps answer some of your questions."


Robert