Alcohol fuel - The obvious answer, Yes or No?

VossistArts,

As I understand it, the stuff that burns is vapor. Cars already run on vaporized gasoline.

I recently read of a diesel injection system for the big rigs that burns fuel more efficiently by spraying the diesel into the combustion thingy so you get more bang for your buck, so to speak.

 

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I thnk that the only "carborator trick" that might work to reduce the cost of driving is to have a water mist injector that puts fine liquid water drops into the already burning fuel vapor. - sort of internal combustion chamber cooling that keeps the presure on the piston high longer. Something like this has been used in some old prop airplanes, years ago. I did a careful study with my old car years ago of gas efficiency in a 100+ mile drive home I made every week end one summer. I stopped at the one traffic light, even if it was green, filled the tank exactly to the scratch line I had made in the filler tube at start and end of trip, with car always parked in the same position near the pump at the two same gas stations, read the gas used to an estimated 0.01gal accuracy, etc. By edit: I was working at oil refinery and got newly gapped spark plugs for free that had 100hours of use in the dynamonitor lab prior to each trip.

My data made no sense until I included the moisture content of the air. Better MPG when the road was wet or best in slight fog. I seriously considered adding water tray with rag for carborator air to pass thru, but wrecked car first. I do not understand why already vaporized water helps, but mist sure should, if injected at the right time.

 

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Scientific American selected 2005's 50 most important advances /notable achiements. Two were for airplanes, (Airbus 380 & Ipanema 202) that had their first flights in 2005. ("Ipanema" as in "Girl from Ipanema" song.) SA's text about the Ipanema 202 follows, with bold added by Billy T:

With oil prices at record levels, pollution limits in place at many airports and the threat of emission-control regulations, the global aviation industry has good reason to embrace alternative fuel technology. The single-seat EMB 202 Ipanema agricultural utility aircraft from Neiva/Embraer is the first production-series model to burn ethanol produced from sugarcane. This achievement is a natural progression for Brazil because its automobiles have been running on this type of renewable alcohol fuel for more than two decades, an effort that was launched in response to the 1970s oil crisis.

Not only is ethanol a third or fourth the price of aviation gasoline and a cleaner energy source, it helps to improve the aircraft's overall performance. The new Ipanema piston engine also brings other advantages, including lower maintenance costs and a 20 percent reduction in operating costs. So far Neiva/Embraer has received more than 100 orders for the novel crop duster and has plans to install alcohol-burning engines in some of its other models. Company engineers say that conversion of existing aviation gas engines is not only feasible but cost-effective.

 

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draged up old thread instead of start new one to add some recent facts:

Brazil had 6.5 million hectars in sugar cane in 2005/06 harvest. (Our fall is in March) and because alcohol demand is rapidly growing will harvest from approximately 9 million hectars around the end of 06, start of 07. The university study (see post of 11-25-05 below) indicates that in Brazil 250 million hectars of pasture or woodlands are suitable for sugar cane production.

In 2005, 2.4billion liters of alcohol were exported and because 80+ % of all new cars and about half of the 30 million old cars in Brazil now run on alcohol, domestic consumption will require most of the alcohol from the new fields growing cane. - I.e. exports in 2006 will be about 2.6 billion liters. As only a very small fraction of the land potentially available is growing cane (~4%) the exports could be greatly increased if the markets were opened (tariff, quotas, subsidies to rich in Iowa were eliminated so your cost of driving could be less than $2/gallon again.)

There are approximately 89 locations in southern half of Brazil where cane is converted into alcohol, two of which are less than 2 years old, but there are 38 new ones being constructed now.

Japan and perhaps China are signing up for long term contractual supplies of alcohol, forming joint companies with Brail to transport it, etc. Soon It will be too late for the US to get any, even if US were to drop its protectionist policy that adds to both American's tax bills (the subsidy on corn plus a per gallon subsidy for alcohol produced from it) and your cost of driving each mile on $3+/gallon gas.

Irony is that most Americans did not vote for the ex oil CEO now in the White House, but his oil industry is being well protected, despite the cost to the average American of keeping cheap alcohol out of the US.

A few days ago, I paid $R1.14/liter for alcohol and dollar was buying 2.40 Real that day. That is same a US$1.76/gallon, but on a per mile basis (correcting for the 30% less energy in alcohol) that is same as $2.51/ gallon gas, which I think is abnormally high due to fact sugar is at all time high, like many commodities are. - Alcohol was only R$0.70/liter when wife bought our flex fuel car less than two years ago, but the great increase in sales of alcohol using cars has combined with the high prices of sugar to force the price of alcohol above one Real per liter.

 

Billy T:

How long before Brazil is projected to become self-sufficient in terms of producing all of its liquid fuels (alcohol) from sugar-cane. What percentage of the entire world production of petroleum could conceivably be replaced by Brazil's alcohol production, if most of the farmland were used for that purpose?

The US has very few sugar-cane growing regions. Some here in Hawaii (Maui and Kauai still grow cane, Big Island and Oahu no longer do), some in Florida, and some in Georgia I believe. Australia grows lots of cane still, I believe. I'm not up on the sugar industry - beet sugar is being grown again in Idaho, I believe, and elsewhere. How feasible is it to use the world's agricultural fields to grow for alochol and/or bio-diesel, while still retaining productivity for food? Are we talking about 10% replacement of petroleum, or 90% replacement, by growing for alcohol, etc., while still keeping adequate lands in food production?

Walter L. Wagner (Dr.)

 

(1):Far in the future, well past "peak oil." This is because Brazil's oil company (PetroBras, more than half government owned, but I have some of their ADRs, which are now showing a four fold gain for me.) turned "self sufficient" in petroleum products about 6 months ago. (This is not quite true, as Brazil's off shore deposits tend to be heavy crude and currently Brazil lacks enough refinery capacity for this type so some is sold and lighter is purchased. A new refinery will begin construction soon - various states were offering tax deals trying to be chosen. I think a site North of RIO has been selected. Brazil and Venezuela, I believe, are already building a new one together in Venezuela for heavy crude.)

(2) I doubt that it can be 50% for many years, mainly because demand (read China&India) is increasing faster than production. Clearly, after "peak oil" there is a good chance alcohol will provide most of the liquid fuel. (Let us hope via enzymatic conversion of ANY cellulose to some type of sugar and that some, yet to be developed (genetic engineered?), yeast can convert into a liquid fuel, probably alcohol. If world's liquid fuel still comes from sugar cane - I doubt even the current level of food + fuel demand is possible.) See (3) for the importance of "end user efficiency."

(3)Impossible, without considerable starvation, as already exists, plus great improvements in end user efficiency, especially electric powered public transport (driven by nuclear power). Bring back the trolley (or even cable cars, for short steep runs.)!
I also think that buses that run on "super flywheels" between stops where they pause a few (5?) minutes to spin the flywheel up again make a lot of sense. - Some "flywheel buses" of this nature I think were in experimental use in Sweden about 10 years ago, but they used a common iron flywheel and thus could not go kilometers between recharges. (I have not seen the final results of this experiment. - if you find it, please post.)

(4)Nothing to add to what I said in (2). At different times, both 10% and 90% may be correct and at other intermediate times, every percentage in between.

 

Alcohol: Must harvest the sugar cane, extract the juices, ferment them, collect the vapors, and very carefully purify the explosive vapors by controlling the temperatures at which they cool. Each step requires a bit of heavy machinery and power to make any large quantities.

Hemp: Shake the seeds out of the plant, squeeze them using very little energy, and filter them. The fuel is ready for use in a diesel engine or maybe even more importantly in an oil furnace for heating the home. A farm family can literally squeeze thousands of gallons a year out of their own crop with simple machinery, not necessarily using electric power but I would recommend powered machinery. One plant can yield a gallon and more. One person can process a hundred plants a day by hand easily. It's just a freaking weed that puts about half of its weight into seeds and those seeds are 25 to 30 percent perfectly good oil for fuel and lubrication. It's always been the obvious answer to much of our energy needs. Growing sugar cane for this purpose is absolutely farcical.

 

First part not true for two reasons:

(1)You can quench the vapors rapidly, in seconds, if you like or take a week to condense them. - It is simply not true that careful control of temperature is required. - Many a moonshiner in the hills of West Virginia where I grew up could not even read. - Are you telling me they practiced "careful temperature control." LOL

(2) Alcohol tends to burn, not explode. I do not know for sure, but think it may be impossible to make it explode, even if your are trying to make it explode. Even if an air/alcohol vapor mix will explode*, the vapor streaming off the distillation pot and thru the condenser has excluded all the oxygen by its flow. Without an oxidizer, it cannot even burn.

Hope I do not recall your "absolutely farcical" comment while driving my 100% alcohol fueled car* - If I LOL again then I might have an accident. With sugar cane produce alcohol in Brazil, you get 8 fold energy gain on fossil fuel input requirements. There is still some debate as to whether or not US corn produced alcohol is a net energy yield (I think it is. - I.e. about 100 Btu fossil in to get 110Btu alcohol out). I might be persuaded to agree US corn based alcohol is "absolutely farcical" as using it instead of gasoline in your car will surely add to CO2 release, almost doubling it, but replacing gasoline with sugar cane alcohol economically produced in tropical lands will slightly remove already released CO2, not add to it. That, combined with its lower cost and liquid form with little change to existing infrastructure required, make the only thing absolutely farcical about it is your uninformed comment.
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*When my 100% alcohol car starts, it uses a "thimble full" of pure gas from a separate small tank as it is hard to get alcohol to burn or explode in the initially cold cylinder. This little gasoline tank goes dry several times a year as I forget to put a gallon of gas in it and only remember when I can't get the car to start up easily.

 

What is absolutely farcical is using all that machinery and processing to accomplish what you need almost no tools to accomplish with hemp. It's farcical because in this field we really need to maximize our gains. You get a lot more pounds of oil from an acre of hemp than from an acre of sugarcane.

Ok, maybe it isn't absolutely farcical to use sugarcane, but it is pretty absurd when better stuff grows wild in the ditches. You don't have to ferment or distill hempseed oil. Now, if it becomes legal, I can laugh at your 100 percent alcohol car because I could grow a lot of gallons of fuel on an acreage that is not much good for anything else and if I have to I can squeeze it out by hand with simple equipment. The seeds crush very easily. Very nearly zero BTU in for millions of BTU out and I can stand to lose some weight anyway. The same goes for wood. I've lived places where if my car was powered by burning wood I would never run out of fuel. I've been over how much energy you gain over what you expend processing the stuff, a while back.

The ability to produce usable electrical and heat energy with low tech methods and low cash investments is something that could tip some critical balances.

Also, alcohol explodes quite readily in the right mix of air and alcohol. The stills they used during Prohibition exploded quite regularly. They had hot vapors and had to try to concentrate the alcohol. Also, their equipment was often quite primitive and unpredictable.

The problem you may be having which requires the gasoline to start is probably vapor lock. Alcohol evaporates a lot faster than gasoline does. This isn't a problem once the engine starts because it is drawing more air into the cylinders.

 

Did you not read all the power point posts of your own reference? I did. I think all your questions are answered there. BTW your reference is well worth the few minutes it takes to down load approximately 125 power point slides. Hemp is certainly discussed, even more than tropical sugar cane, as many of the sources collected into it are US related.

 

You are confusing apples and oranges. Yes there are many vegetable sources of oil that can replace diesel. Diesel engines are heavy, mainly suitable for trucks. We need to be moving towards lighter weight cars.

In Brazil 100s of small farms are already cultivating the weed "mamona" for its oil and it is already being added to diesel fuels (1 to 2 %). Recent study released by PertoBrass indicates that to really displace significant oil in diesel fuel soybeans are the way to go in Brazil, at least. Their oil is added during a hydrogen processing stage which lowers oil's sulphur content, hence they are calling this soy bean oil "H-diesel." two refineries are already making H-diesel. I was sad to learn this as mamona is a low-water-requirement, zero-fertilizer requirement weed that grows wild all over Brazil. I seriously doubt that you can just squeze hemp seed and add the oil to diesel without processing as you seem to be suggesting. No other vegitable oil, mamona included, can do this in significant % addition. Can you support your claim? (With a creditable journal article, not "love-the-Earth.org" type of web cite.)

Just a piece of friendly advice:
Goolge more and/or think more, before you post. I am growing tired of correcting you. At least you have now shown some willingness to learn - you did learn the difference between “hysterisis” and “eddy currents” in our last conflict, but still do not have it quite right as you thought magnetic hysterisis has something to do with “delay” in you last post. (It doesn’t.)

 

I was taught that hysteresis meant pretty much "delay." That's a six of one and half a dozen of the other argument. Hysteresis means that there is a delay between the time that the magnetic field changes direction and the time that some of the atoms of the magnetic material line up with it.

Most of the web sites that you seem to wave away so easily come from actual research articles. Do you actually check to see if they provide references? Why does "love the earth" seem to be an idea that you hold contempt for?

 

Also, Billy, it looks to me like you attempt to invalidate my position by arguing from a position of ignorance. You've claimed to be my superior on this kind of subject more than once. Perhaps you should find out something for yourself about the use of hemp for fuel.

 

I do not, with rare exceptions, google for information. Most of what I want to know has already been squirreled away in my memory during the past 60+ years I have been studying. (You will often see in my post the phrase: "If memory serves me correctly.") I find it appalling how much nonsense is out there on the web. Not worth my time usually. In some areas, where I do not already have years of experience, I do google.

We were speaking of magnetic hysterisis. Perhaps the idea of delay is common in non-technical use of this term.

later by edit: Let me slightly correct that. It must be common and that is why the term is used in this technical area. The magnetic field in a magnetic material is not determined by the amper turns (the "B field") applied, but by the recent history of applied B fields. In this sense there is a "delay," but that delay is not the disipation mechanism. That is proportional to the area inside the H vs B curve of a cyclic application of B fields and associated with the actual "flipping of domains"*.

(Thus there is at least some connection with the idea of "delay" in the choice of the name "hysterisis." I was not recalling this when we were speaking of loss mechanism, eddy current and hystersis. Even the eddy currents have a delay in that the eddy current is not in phase with the externally applied field, once you are inside the conductor, but once again, this "delay" is not the cause of the disipation - the disipation is still the I^2R losses of the eddy current, not any "delay".)
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*I never really thought much about the real mechanism, but it now seems to me hysterises may actually be "micro eddy currents" I.e. as the domain flips there is a very local dB/dt term and that means a very local electric field and that mean a local I^2 R loss! -See that is why I like to teach - I almost always learn when I do so.

 

"Delay" is one synonym for "hysteresis." It's good enough for me.

The thing about hempseed oil is old history that has made a lot of rounds. Jack Herer's book contains not one thing that cannot be verified with the usual book type references. He made sure of that. The history of the diesel engine includes the fact that it was originally run on hempseed oil and that people have actually run pure hempseed oil in diesel engines successfully.

I do like it better when the proper studies are referenced, but some people also take the oil and put it in the engine and run it and write it up. Myself I think the "biodiesel" recipes are unnecessary and "esterification" may be more smoke and mirrors when you are talking about hempseed oil. You have an oil with properties roughly similar to those of diesel so I think that all it needs is a tune-up if it needs that. We already know that it's possible to run passenger cars with diesel engines. They do exist.

 

I do not know that essentially unprocessed hemp oil is not a suitable replacement for refined diesel, but remain skeptical. I have no doubt that diesel motors will run on it. They can run on old french-fry oil. The first ran on peanut oil I think.

That running is not a proof they are a viable replacement for refined diesel. The instruction manual for the first VW I owned stated it could run on benzene. (The toxicity of benezene was not as well known them.) I once put some very cheap gas (actually it was probably mainly untaxed paint thiner) in my four wheel drive, old Russian* made Lada, which is a "gas only" car. Well it did run, but never again will I do that. You need to be sure that the fuel you feed the engine does not destroy it after a few years of use. I am not saying it is impossible for this to be true of simple unrefined hemp oil, but I would be very surprised if it is. After all, PetroBrass has spent millions and come to a conlculsion that soybean oil must replace the currently used mamona oil. I am sure they looked into hemp oil and many others.

About "love the Earth.org" I just made that name up half hour ago to illustrate the type of sites more full of hopes more than facts one can encounter on the net. If it really exists, I want to state I know nothing about the quality of what is there.
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* Russian gas was, at least then, very low quality, so I thought it would be OK.

 

Yes. So do SUVs. the most cost effective way to get better fuel economy is reduce the car weight. Diesel engines ignite the fuel/air mixture by very high compression and must be strong to do so. - read that as heavy. If the moter is heavy the frame must be heavy. I do not remember the exact numbers, but roughly every pound you can take out of the engine weight becomes at least 5 pounds off the car weight. Diesel car would be a step backwards in the drive to reduce fuel consumption. Lighter, not heaver, cars are needed.

 

Your are aware, I hope, that there is nothing to "tune up" in a diesel as there are no sparks plugs and thus no "timing of ignition" to adjust. Again pause and think a little before you post. If I am mistaken, tell me what you "tune up" in a diesel.