Anyone successfully used veggie oil for gasoline engines?
 

Most waste veggie oil mod is on diesel cars, but most people have gasoline cars, that's why I want to explore WVO use on gasoline cars.

I have tried once to blend 0.3 gallon of virgin veggie oil with 3 gallons of E10 gasoline in a PFI gasoline car, just for a test. The result is unsatisfactory.

Car started misfiring and losing power about 60 miles on the freeway out of the gas station. RPM was around 3000. I checked the spark plugs, they have been fouled with a brown oil-like substance. The misfiring persisted until I topped up the 10 gallon tank with gasoline.

It seems veggie oil cannot combust fast enough as a fog ejected from nozzle with even 9 times of gasoline.

Have anyone tried running a gasoline engine on heated veggie oil? What about vaporized veggie oil? Anyone tried running partial veggie oil in a GDI engine?

I've been aware of some people adding up to 50% vegetable oil to gasoline in countries such as Thailand and Brazil, yet I'd take it with a grain of salt due to the oil not vaporizing properly. Maybe adding a tablespoon of turpentine to each tank could help...

But if I were willing to try, I'd take a look at the preparation done to gassers in Finland and other Scandinavian countries to use kerosene in the '70s and '80s, such as a lower compression ratio.

When it comes to direct injection, it may work better due to the increased heat at the compression stroke, and also taking the Hesselman engines as reference, because they retained spark-ignition yet could handle heavy fuels because of the direct injection.

You will need a vehicle with Gasoline Direct Injection (GDI).
 

The vegetable oil is just about impossible to ignite if it is sprayed out of a common gasoline port injector (45-60 pounds per square inch injection pressure). A GDI engine runs 2000 to 3000 PSI. This results in a much finer atomization of the fuel oil giving it a better flame front.

Look up the military applications of diesel fueled outboards and drone propeller engines. They are fueled with JP8 but are spark ignited. Emissions are horrid, but that isn't a problem for the military.

At least the outboards were 2-stroke, which is quite different on some aspect, yet the direct injection was precisely what enabled them to provide a heavy-fuel operating mode while also retaining the ability to run on gasoline.

Well say good bye to the octane rating of that gasoline.
I'm seeing spark knock running 250:1 mix of 2-stroke oil.
Any sizeable portion of vegetable oil would make the gasoline unusable.

This is the UAV engine I was thinking of.
 

https://www.unmannedsystemstechnolog...y/rcv-engines/

Not much is said about the fueling and ignition system but you can make some assumptions.

If you look far enough down on the page, their engine controller has an integrated fuel delivery as well as a dual spark ignition system.

Dual-spark ignition is standard on aviation due to reliability, yet it may also improve the flame spread.

I've mixed about 2 gal of diesel with 13 gal of gas in a ((carbureted engine)) with so so results in 40F temps.
It had a random miss under load, got better as it heated up, but didn't quite go away.
Had it been 55F overnight or more (my overnight lows are rarely over that) I think it would have ran better.
In my opinion I think a carbureted gas engine would run on pure diesel if everything was heated up before it hit the carb. As well as the engine up to temp.

It was a 300-6 with the 8 to 1 compression.
The EFI version is 8.8 to 1
The original 1965/1972~ version is 8.9 to 1
The other thing I'll note is there was no 10% ethanol in the gas.

I think you would have far better luck running biodiesel in a carbureted engine then filtered fry oil. And doing it in a fuel injected gas engine Is going to be very poor results.
0.01c

I’ve used small amounts of veggie oil in my truck as top end lube (4oz per tank) seems to not mind it.

Considering some cars which could run on kerosene, including the Ford Model T, maybe if you could vaporize Diesel fuel it would work reasonably too, yet it may be harder to vaporize...


Not only biodiesel is thinner, and most likely easier to vaporize, it's also easier to mix with gasoline and ethanol if you want to dillute it enough to eventually not have the need to pre-heat it.

veggie oil and gasoline
 

Vegetable oil and diesel provide a 'lubricity' in a compression-ignition engine which is not a requirement in an electric ignition engine.
If you'll visit the American Petroleum Institute's ( API ) website you may find some info on what separates the fuel requirements between a Diesel and Gasoline engine.
There are pour point, Reid vapor pressure, thermal heating value, flash point, etc., which separate the two fuels.
Diesels operate at compression ratios gasoline engines cannot survive. They are governed by 'Cetane rating, while gasoline engines are governed by 'octane' rating.
I've had 12-semesters of formal automotive training, and never was it recommended that 'ANY' additives be added to a motor vehicle, especially with gasoline engines.
For a few years the local city fleet experimented with bio-diesel, until the EPA shut it all down. There was 'more than met the eye' involved, and the 'veggie' oil tuned out to be a 'bust.'
I recommend that you abandon all efforts to make it work. Cut your losses.

Vegetable oils are triglycerides with mostly 18 carbon chain acids (oleic, linoleic acid), some 12, some 16. Keep in mind octane is 8 and has no oxygens for hydrogen bonding. You have to process it like biodiesel to get glycerol and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatty_acid_methyl_ester to get something even remotely combustible and the boiling point is still extremely high. I don't know how easy it is to make biodiesel at home with methanol and alkali.

Glycerol I think actually does improve octane and can be diluted in ethanol, but you can't use much of it since it's very heavy. It's basically a bunch of alcohols chained together. The esters are AFAIK very low octane but maybe if you mix some heavy aromatic solvents as octane boosters it might work with high intake air temperature.

Spark ignition engines really need low molecular weight hydrocarbons that evaporate easily, that's the big limitation. Maybe if you could separate the esters to burn in diesel engines then burn the trace methanol and glycerol in a gasoline engine mixed into a lot of gasoline it would work, but I don't know how that would be done at home.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsenergylett.6b00421