Are there any benefits to using ethanol?

[MaynardsEden]

I have a flex fuel ranger.
I've run Ethanol through my truck several times, never really liked the MPG difference. I noticed that it goes quicker than Petrol.
I've heard that Ethanol burns hotter than regular fuel, which makes it burn quicker.

I was wondering, since it burns hotter, does it therefore clear carbon and deposits in your engine from used oil and sludge?

I normally put SeaFoam in with my oil for 100 miles every 9,000 miles before an oil change to clear out said sludge and deposits... would doing this with Ethanol help? Make no difference? Do nothing at all?

Just curious

[MagicRat]

Ethanol has fewer BTU's per volume, hence mileage is a little less.

I'm pretty sure ethanol burns with no carbon or soot, so there will be no carbon build up in the engine, and the engine oil will stay a bit cleaner. Carbon build-up can be a bit of a problem with gasoline burning engines when they are operated at low revs and light throttle for long periods of time.

Ethanol burns much more cleanly, for lower emissions of some pollutants, although this is not much of a problem with Gasoline, given modern pollution controls.

But generally, the BIG advantage of ethanol is that it is theoretically carbon - neutral. The plants (mostly corn) that supply the material for making ethanol suck carbon dioxide from the air to grow. Some of this carbon is released back into the air when ethanol is burned, unlike gasoline, where the carbon released had been sequestered for millions of years.

Therefore, ethanol has a lower impact on the environment. But this is not so simple. Farm machinery used to grow the corn burn diesel, thus are releasing sequestered carbon anyways. So even ethanol negatively impacts the environment.

[dondeere]

We make it right here in North America!

[Blue Bowtie]

Both ethanol and methanol burn cooler, not hotter. While it is true that a liquid volume of ethanol will produce less heat energy, it does produce more moles of the gasses resulting from combustion. The , resulting in less of a decrease in BMEP than one might calculate based upon thermal expansion alone. As anyone who understands fuels in a compression engine would understand, not all of the power produced is from heat - There's a little more science to it than just that. As a matter of fact, at the same combustion heat alcohols would produce greater cylinder pressure, but since combustion temperatures are commonly lower, there is up to 12% lower heat/pressure than conventional gasoline produces. Some of that "lost" energy can be recovered by increasing timing advance to create higher BMEP and/or increasing mechanical compression to take full advantage of the cooler and slower burning alcohol.

Another benefit of the cooler combustion is a substantial reduction in oxides of nitrogen during combustion.

Once biomass alcohol production becomes more common the arguments against using corn/cane will be inconsequential. Some would use the shallow argument that it takes more energy to make alcohol than the alcohol would produce in an engine, but there is real science to dispute that. While growing, harvesting, and shipping requires fuel, and brewing corn mash requires significant heat input, there is also a substantial amount of heat used in petroleum cracking and fractionalization towers. It seems that we tend to forget that. There is also a substantial amount of energy used to pump, transport, and move both crude oil before refining, then more energy to pump and move the finished products.

Further, cracking and producer water from oil wells alone also requires a lot of energy to pump, truck (since it isn't piped across fields to the wells), filter and purify, and pump back into the ground under high pressure. People afraid of alcohols tend to disregard all the ancillary energy input and wasted water when calculating the real costs of using petroleum.

The net mass of corn/cane left after fermentation can and is being used as an animal feed supplement. The final mass after petroleum fractionalization is a hazardous material, and must be dealt with accordingly.

We are going to burn SOMETHING in our engines until someone devises a real electric car and not a hybrid, so it might as well be something renewable, cleaner, and less dependent upon politics than industry.

[MaynardsEden]

Thanks for taking the time to write that out, and it did knowledge me up a little. But I would like to know... it being cleaner, with fewer carbon deposits. Does it clean left over carbon deposits already in my engine?

Say for instance I gave up Gasoline completely, would it improve the life of my engine?

My thinking is, if you get worse gas mileage with Ethanol than Petrol, it would make up for it if running Ethanol improved the integrity of your engine.