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East of Broken Bow | Watched an episode of Jay Leno's Garage, as well as read an article he wrote about his Oldsmobile Toranado that he owns. When he had the engine rebuilt, he had it rebuilt to utilize e-85, with a higher compression ratio, and different cam and ignition timing among other things. The purpose of it was an experiment to compare an engine built for e-85 to standard flex-fuel engines which are actually built for regular or e-10 with the flex fuel programming.
What he found out:
His engine designed to run on e-85 got the same HP per gallon of fuel burnt as a standard engine burning regular gasoline. Turns out that by upping the compression ratio and a few other things increased the efficiency of the engine enough to make up for the lower power density of e-85. Now, keep in mind this is Jay Leno, he does not have bean counters telling him to cut corners, so maybe the cost would be prohibitive for auto makers to do what he did, but then again, maybe not. I have no wa of knowing that one.
The second, and more interesting part, at least to me, is that his e-85 engine met California emissions with just a catalyst, nothing else. In fact, I wonder just how much of the efficiency gain he got by not having anything on the engine that wasn't needed to make the engine run (except for the catalyst).
The biggest drawback I saw, which again doesn't matter to Jay Leno, is that the engine is too high compression to run on regular gasoline, it would ping itself to death due to the high compression. However, it will run perfecly well on everything from e-85 all the way up to pure alcohol (or as pure as you can get it - I think anything for fuel has to have enough gasoline added to it so that people will not drink it). | |
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Educate me on ethanol
