Just a Question about Meth/Water and why its not fuel.

[fourthmeal]

Not really off-topic as it pertains to our cars potentially:

If injecting a 50/50 or more mix of methanol/water in our vehicle adds fuel and makes power, why are we not running something like this solely?

The stuff is roughly $1.00 a gallon.

Just wanted to know the physics or chemistry behind why we haven't adopted something like this instead of Gasoline.

Thoughts?

 

[Demi]

I cant fully answer your question, but it seems that some of the disadvantages seem to be: poor cold weather starts due to low heat as compared to gasoline, toxicity of methanol; and high fuel consumption rates due to the stoichiometric air fuel ratio of 6.42, which i would think would more than offset the positive benefits of the $1 per gallon cost. I got my info here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol_fuel

 

[fourthmeal]

Very interesting. Plus I suppose with hundreds of millions of cars running on this, then our window washer fluid would cost 10X as much, eh?


It was just a thought passing in my head.

 

[Chibana]

The water/methanol mixture is added to boosted cars to decrease likelihood of detonation and/or to be able to increase timing advance to make more power. You can't burn a 50/50% blend of water and methanol. It's injected, typically into the intake manifold, to be blended with the air/fuel mixture in small quantities for its cooling effect. I had a Snow Performance water/methanol injection system on my 13 psi supercharged Focus. I had two programs on the tune, one for running with the injection, and one for when the tank was empty (or if I heard detoniation, etc.). I could switch between the two with the flip of a switch, and I had a red LED to indicate when the tank was empty. And just injecting this into a car will not make more power unless the ECU is programmed to use it (as mine was with my Focus).

As someone else pointed out, you CAN run cars on pure methanol.

 

[K. Soze]

Well, the main reason I think is energy output. The energy output of gasoline when burned is greater when compared to methanol (if using the same amounts of both). Therefore, you would have to use more methanol to equal the output of gasoline.

 

[muchdutch]

Because then the oil companies wouldn't be making money........
Yes, car's can be run on all sorts of things - there's a friend of my dad's who has been working on a car to run on used cooking oil (and this is being done by lots of people - saw a doc about a guy in Cali doing it too). But do you think the oil and gas companies would ever let this happen? They would NEVER allow introduction of something like this which would basically take away their golden ticket. The electric car didn't last very long either, despite the fact that it did contribute to oil and gas revenue, just inadvertently.
As the Million-dollar man theme song says:
'We have the technology'......

 

[muchdutch]

Wow. Do I know how to kill a conversation. *sigh* I guess I better get used to big brother tapping my phones because if he wasn't before, he sure is now!

 

[dkswim]

look at racing applications there are soo many forms of auto racing that use alcohol one od the disadvantages ive seen is you use 3 times the volume of liguid for same HP and distance of gas powered cars. but there are advantages to the alcohol setup like cooler running