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Registered Member #1262
Joined: Fri Jan 25 2008, 05:22AM
Location: Maryland, USA
Posts: 451
I was thinking with gas prices at such crazy levels, Isopropyl Alcohol is now marginally cheaper. If you were to salt out the water, could Isopropanol be used instead of gasoline?
I know it's in a lot of dry-gas additives for getting rid of water in the tank, so I guess it isn't harmful to the car to have IPA in the tank. And the ignition temp should be low enough to set off. But would it vaporize correctly? Would the research octane rating/burn rate be right? How high is the energy density? Could you run a car off >99% IPA?
Of course it's also derived from oil depending on the process, so any savings would be in the event of a major spike in gas prices...
Registered Member #96
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:37PM
Location: CI, Earth
Posts: 4062
Doubt it. Main problem is going to be modifying the engine's software to burn a different fuel (octane alteration would result in mixture anomalies thanks to the lambda sensor), i did see a hack in EPE to read those so it might be possible to build a circuit to read the realtime data, apply bias and/or time delay and feed result back to ECU.
Registered Member #1484
Joined: Wed May 14 2008, 03:24PM
Location: Cary, NC, USA
Posts: 27
You can run an engine off of practically any fuel with the appropriate compression ratio, intermix ratio, valve, and ignition timings. Many substitutes are similar enough in combustion to either gasoline or diesel that the mechanical variables (valve timing and compression ratio) need not be varied for acceptable results. I am not sure if you can cheaply modify a gasoline engine to burn isopropanol or not, but I agree that isopropanol is more than likely not economically viable as a fuel. If you want a cheap alternative fuel, look at straight vegetable oil in an old Mercedes Diesel. I understand you can usually talk it out of restaurant owners for free as they have to pay for disposal otherwise, and if push comes to shove peak oil post-apocalypse style I believe you could even fairly easily press your own vegetable oil.
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Running a car off Isopropanol?
