Jon Hagen said: (quoted from post at 15:58:43 01/07/10) You also say that the same modifications that allow more efficiency with ethanol would apply to any other fuel as well. Not in the case of gasoline. Best burn efficiency is if you run cylinder pressure right to the point of detonation. You can run more cylinder pressure with an 89 or higher octane ethanol / gasoline blend than you can with 87 octane gasoline. Also consider that I have been told that fuel blenders (E10) can use a low octane gasoline made from the heavier oil fractions which contain more BTU's than the lighter fractions used to make premium gasoline.
You can use a lower octane, yet higher BTU content gasoline to blend with ethanol which brings the octane level back to an acceptable number while gaining back a bit of those lost 3.5% BTU's.
I hate people using the fuel economy numbers taken from todays flex fuel cars. They are a terrible compromize, they have to be built to tolerate the lowest octane junk gasoline without detonation damage, usually well under 10/1 compression ratio which makes them very ill equipped to use the high octane properties of the ethanol / gasoline blends and especially E85. I don't know of any flex fuel car that uses an Atkinson cycle engine to take advantage of the higher octane ethanol blends, as their limited WOT power level is pretty bad on lower octane fuel without the help of a hybrid's electric motor boost.
Yes, it is difficult to know everything. Chevy, GMC, Cadillac all have Atkinson cycle 10.8:1 , E85 engines. They are no where near alone in 10:1 CR numbers, as that can be found at a glance in Ford, BMW, Porsche, Lambo (12.5:1), Nissan, Honda, Toyota, Jag, and many more, some flex fuel, some not. These CR's are possible due to advances in electronics, variable valve timing, combustion chamber design, new fuel injection techniques, etc. A 2010 Ford flex fuel test shows 16.3% MPG loss with E85 versus pure gasoline.
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Today's Featured Article - Listening to Your Tractor - by Curtis Von Fange. Years ago there was a TV show about a talking car. Unless you are from another planet, physically or otherwise, I don’t think our internal combustion buddies will talk and tell us their problems. But, on the other hand, there is a secret language that our mechanical companions readily do speak. It is an interesting form of communication that involves all the senses of the listener. In this series we are going to investigate and learn the basic rudimentary skills of understanding this lingo.
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