Quote:
Originally Posted by rmay635703
Nothing by itself, you can have an inefficient motor running on an energy dense fuel compared to an efficient motor running on a low density fuel and have the answer end up moot or even in favor of the lense dense fuel. You can even run the same motor on different fuels and due to complex engine management and odd behaviors of the fuel mix itself end up with the same fuel economy or better than expected comparitively.
There were peer reviewed papers on this subject of how ethanol blends commonly get better than expected fuel economy due to vapor pressure phantoms AKA the mix did not have the expected volitility.
There are also situations like comparing my fathers 1985 Yugo to my 010 cobalt. My cobalt is over 1000's heavier, has double the motor runs on e10 and get 15mpg better than the Yugo did on the real gas available in the late 80's and early 90's.
I would also estimate if his yugo was on the road (its in the garage with a frozen brake and rotten hoses) it would get this 20% worse economy on e10, yet my cobalt gets better on 89 octane e10 than it does on 87 octane e5ish.
All antidotal in this case but a million monkeys can't all be wrong.
|
You bring up a good point. The biggest problem with Gasohol in the 70's was that cars were not tuned or built to run on it at the time. I doubt they will keep dictating the gasoline blend based on 20+ year old cars but it does leave a lot of people, like me too, with problems if we own a car that is not up-to-date.
While I realize some people are seeing huge(more than 3.5%) MPG drops with E10 I think it is a problem that can be fixed not some base problem with Ethanol. The best efficiencies in regards to MPG per unit of energy have been with 50/50. And not just on custom jobs like on the Ricardo flexfuel engine. I've even heard from some people(some on Ecomodder) that 50/50 is better. But it is not a commonly accepted finding. The more I read about Ethanol the better I feel about it's properties. But Popular opinion on the internets is that ethanol is bad. It was Ethanol blends that were capable of operating on a variable geometry(bleh) turbo charger with 19:1 Static Compression ratio not Unleaded Gasoline.
10% Ethanol is for the Federal oxygenate requirement and that is the maximum, I've heard it might be closer to 5-7% due to available and the minimum but I'm not 100%. Most states don't have laws that require the pumps to state if they may contain Ethanol, Kentucky is one of them. I've seen pumps that state they contain E10 like Shell stations as a rule while others say nothing and some like the BP station I saw in Clarksville, TN that stated that all grades contained up to 10% Ethanol. I've seen a Shell station with E85 too as crazy as that sounds. it wasn't under the canopy like Kerosene but it was on the property.