That was the variables, but I got your point.

 

WTF are you talking about? If you are going to claim I am spreading misinformation of any sort you better provide a quote and context.

I AM a tuner. So I don't care what someone told you, talk about what you've actually done before acting like an authority.

 

What are you going on about ? I didn't claim you did anything.

I am telling you now that is not how you do a proper comparison as you did not include any tests and their results and methodology or any data to back up what you said. What you said would be called a hypothesis.

Me an authority , that's a good one. That's just how I talk .

 

What am I on about? You said:

How about you elaborate?

It's not exactly rocket science level thinking required to find out that E85 will not achieve the fuel economy of E10 or E0 Gas. That goes for N/A or Forced Induction.

Likewise if there is any doubt in your mind about E85 being capable of supporting more power and at higher boost pressures than Gasoline you should probably refrain from participating in such a discussion.

I stopped posting hard data here because I am sick of internet experts. I have tuned, driven and raced a variety of vehicles that have run on everything from diesel, propane, ethanol, hydrogen, methanol, toluene, M5 nitromethane, gasoline, etc. and combinations of the above.

With static compression ratios in piston engines ranging from 7:1-25:1 both HCCI and ICE. As well as a couple turbine engines and a handful of rotaries.

As much as I love me some scholarly works and SAE papers, they are not the "be all end all" even though they are for most purposes authoritative..

In theory there is no difference between practice and theory. In practice there is.

 

That is what I was trying to do.

If you want to compare fuels using such a general guideline that would mean "Regular Gasoline is always cheaper per mile, E85 always makes more power, and 93 octane is always the most expensive."

Do you really want to get into that kind of speculation? Because not everyone has those same results. People in Iowa might pay less for E85 per mile while people in Cali might pay so much more for Regular that the 20 cents for premium is worth it for the MPG or someone in LA(lower alabama) might get regular gasoline so cheap that it's cheaper to just buy regular gasoline.

Even the BTUs don't tell the whole story. I've heard of people who lose 1/3 of their MPG from E10 and likewise for E85. I've also heard of guys who get the same MPG on E85 with very little difference. Mostly the results are about 70%-85% of the MPG they had on Gasoline but closer to 75%.

And you really didn't include price into your post which while big on other details was short on some numbers like MPG, mileage loss, and cost per gallon, BTU, and per mile.

If you really want a real world test of the difference you can check it out on Ecomodder, there are a couple guys there trying to figure out the real world Fuel economy differences. It started when a guy with a prius decided to test how much of a difference there was between regular gasohol and ethanol blends.

 

Corn prices aren't just up because of E85. Corn prices are up for the same damn reason gas prices are up, we are all getting F*cked by the Commodities Market. When you've got companies like Goldman sachs doing nothing but buying and recycling nothing but 'long' futures on things like oil and corn (and engaging in more transactions than than actual producers) , it's going to screw up the whole damn system.

 

Goldman Sachs set the barrel price at $120 a week ago and heard on a local radio station that gas prices were to fall to 3.50 by summer because the refiners are working overtime to get enough gas made to lower the price when we had over stock at last announcement. What are they up too it dont make sense?

 

Once upon a time this wasn't allowed. You couldn't buy oil, corn, hogs, etc. just for the sake of sitting on it, waiting for it to go up. You could only buy it for short term, e.g. If I am selling hogs and nobody is buying hogs, a second party could buy the hogs until the real buyers are buying again. Ever since they deregulated commodities, prices have been going up.

 

Don't put words in my mouth.

Where do you see me specifically talking about cost per mile there, chief? I am talking about the physical volume of fuel involved and the performance as in power output that can be attained.

E85 will support more power under boost.
E0 Gasoline will see better fuel economy, as in miles per gallon.

Quotation marks are for actual quotes. And again you are saying "I've heard.."

I don't give a flying f*ck about what you've heard. Stick to experience and facts.

The fact is: At lambda 1.0 you are going to see ~9.8:1 for E85 and ~14.6:1 for E0 Gasoline. That is not speculation.

 

I agree, This is not the AMERICAN way I remember.

 

I know this is supposed to be a E85 thread but its a fuel just like racing fuel,gasoline. There is so many variables in tuning for proper HP and a different tune for MPG. E85 needs 35 percent more fuel than E0 gasoline for lambda which means if you lean it out to 16a/f better mpg will happen but you could damage your engine running too lean. Max HP with E85 is going to use almost 40 percent more fuel than E0.

http://www.o2-technology.com/tech/Lambda.pdf

The car in question is the FIT and S/D has had awesome results using a Mixture of E85 and gasoline so with out a gauge like ultra gauge where we can compare timing,map,fuel trims and cat temps. we are all speculating because we dont have the numbers. The good news is that the FIT has promise to run Higher ethanol blends from the factory.

E85 Mustangs.com - Tuning for E85

I am beginning to like E85 but its hard to find and racing fuel is easier to get.

Found another link but I think Ive posted this before. http://www.rhapsodyingreen.com/rhaps...evel_study.pdf

 

Exactly. You were being general about both without any numbers to back it up. I'm just asking you to do the math with those kinds of comparisons. I posted a study to back up my % claims. E85 adds 4-6% more power and gets 4-6% more Miles per BTU. The deciding factor is how much it costs per BTU. That is all.

 

You don't have the faintest clue of what you are discussing.

You will not make more power N/A on E85 with only 10.4:1CR.

 

My experience tends toward AC's conclusion that usable power per BTU is higher with E85. Even though E85 has 30% less energy in it than 93 octane E10, my driving experience was almost identical with the E10 and my E70 blend. Since fuel economy was 6% lower with the E70, that indicates the injectors were flowing about 6% more fuel, while torque was almost identical to 93 octane E10. Therefore, my usable energy per BTU (which is NOT the same as energy per gallon) was probably 20-25% higher with E70 than with E10.

The characteristics of a particular fuel do not disappear just because I'm not running boost.

By the way, I want to reiterate that my overall power and torque are highest with 93 octane E10, followed by E70, followed by 87 octane E10. My overall fuel economy is highest with 93 E10, followed by 87 E10, followed by E70. My price spread per mile over all 3 fuels is about $1.00 to $2.00 difference per 11-gallon tank.

 

I dont like to argue, but more air and fuel=more power. Same principle as Turbo,nitrous and bigger cams. You are raising VE so more power is made but I think the car has to tuned and just adding a mix is just leaning the air fuel.

Been looking around and found a few things. http://www.liquidsunenergy.com/learning/ppt/ice.pdf

Mr mahout, I found out that Honda is working on a flex vehicle, just not here yet. E85 | Honda Civic FFV

 

They say explosion, but thats not how I learned the engine cycles, so Mr. Mahout I know what your talking about now and thank you.

 

Forced induction only means more power by adding more of the same fuel-air mixture. than when unforced. Up to the point that the compression yields detonation rather than burning.
The Point is no matter how much E85 you force into an engine there will never be as much power as obtained from straight gasoline under the same conditions. It all comes down to the BTu in the fuel and E85 doesn't have enough to make up for the small amount of anti-detonation gained with ethanol so more boost can be used.
If it were, dragsters would use a boatload of it and they don't for obvious reasons.

 

Depends on which class we are talking about... and even then a lot of the big shots in the landspeed and standing mile world are switching to anhydrous E98.

I am talking about folks who are pushing +1000awhp out of 2.0L 4-cyls using 55+ psi on GT4202R/S400Sx/HX-52 sized turbos.

Guys are maxing out the new low-z FIC2150's and having to run a second rail. See: John Wigger, Mike Reichen, Steven Johnson, etc.

For the quarter mile guys in modified street the a bunch of the boys running 10's and 9's on small displacement motors have made the switch to E85.

The energy/gallon is way off vs. gas you are right, so they dump in an insane amount of fuel. But when we get to the extremes like in drag racing other things come into play. For instance, E85 actually like higher IATs. So much so that many folks skip the IC core and run a hotpipe with a couple injectors upstream of the throttle body. This is even more common on the methanol cars.

4x 950cc/min injectors can support ~600awhp on a boosted gasoline application. To do the same on E85 requires 1450cc/min injectors. As well as a couple Bosch-044 sized pumps mounted in parallel or a mechanical pump mounted off a cam gear. Ask me how I know.

Alcohol's do have their place, you just need a LOT of it to match the output of a gasoline based fuel like C16.

If you are talking about the Methanol cars, Methanol has an even lower energy content by volume than E85. So they just dump more in as they up the boost and run pig rich. Some of them as rich as 4:1

Nitromethane/Top Fuel is a completely different world so we'll leave that alone for this discussion.

 

Its all about VE, E85 uses 50 percent more fuel compared to E0 gasoline. Hondas are 85 percent efficient on E0 and 88.5 on E10. There is more BTUs at lambda E0 is 114000 and E85 is 122700 so thats 7.5 percent gain potential. Mpg will suffer but we are not talking mpg. 14.7/9.8=1.50 . Ethanol will also gain power from the cooler burn with more timing and the extra volume adding compression. Gasoline gallon equivalent - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Force induction raises the VE past 100 but the static compression doesn't change. Thats why diesel is not burned when running 30 pounds of boost. It just raises the VE past 300 percent. Its like taking a 1.5 and making it in a 4.5+ liter motor at half the weight of a bigger motor. This motor would be at around 308 HP. Change the cam and intake and exhaust the VE changes and the turbo triples the gain of the increase of the motor. Sorry if I am not explaining this right but this is the way I understand it.

 

We are all over the place on this one guys.

SB VE is entirely independent of the fuel you use, unless you are using it pre-TB to cool the charge.

How much oxygen the alcohol fuel brings with is considered separate from VE if that is what you are getting at.. and for tuning purposes when making a VE table in many Piggybacks/Standalones VE on a Speed Density table is still only going to read 100% at peak torque.

Here's a screen shot of what I am talking about, this is from a RoadCourse car on SpeedDensity running a 16G turbo:


This is kind of an ugly one, but this is what finally made the ECU happy and the car ran like a raped ape afterwards.


For the record, earlier in the conversation I personally was referring to MPG because when most people, myself included, are talking about fuel economy we are referring to the distance you can travel on a gallon of the fuel being discussed.

If we start talking about cost per mile, we would have to use a couple sample locations.. and even then if we start looking at the unsubsidized cost of corn ethanol things get ugly.

You are right in that for 30psi boost (2 Bar or 3.0PR) our 1.5L effectively become a ~4.5L engine.

In a higher compression engine, the power potential for E85 would start to come into play. In a stock Fit with our supernanny ECU's and stock VE there will be no real appreciable gains.

Assuming the fuel system could support it and the E85 was more convenient in my area I wouldn't be messing with toluene and water/meth on my boosted cars past and present.. though I might start spraying "neat" or M5 Methanol and skip the water.