Macs wrote: ↑Wed Aug 30, 2017 7:34 am
Yachtsman wrote:
"Jet engines can run on many things paraffin or diesel is just two."
I am well aware that jet engines can be run on many fuels with varying success, I have one in the garage.
Years ago when they were testing ethanol blends here, I was knocked out of the air three times. Two of those were engine failures and the third was a fuel system failure. There were also two general aviation crashes, both fatal, caused by ethanol in the fuel. I would hate to see that repeated again.
Yachtsman also wrote:
"All fossil fuels are biological in nature they just haven't had the benefit of human intelligence in there manufacture."
We could synthesize gasoline from it's component parts, but most people are smart enough to know that it takes more energy to create fuel than the energy released when it is burned. This makes it inefficient and only sustainable if you have an unlimited source of outside energy to waste. It's hard to determine if Ethanol falls into this category. I guess the true test would be to run one plant where all energy inputs, from field to pump had to be supplied by Ethanol from the plant.
Perhaps a Caribbean island that has lots of old sugar plantations on it would be a good place to test out that idea. I Volunteer to oversee such a test. I could go for retirement to the Caribbean!!! The Caribbean is warm enough that that ethanol's lack of volatility is less of a problem too.
Ethanol would never be viable on a engine without injection and an ECU so I have much to thank Josh for.
Jet engines run on many things, but ethanol and high octane fuels wasn't what Sir Frank Whittle had in mind when he invented it to run on a cheap fuel not high octane Avgas, after all he was an RAF officer and it was the 30's. The engine type (the Goblin is one will run on bio-diesel. Axial flow ones have a problem).
Compression ignited engines (diesel) run on many things too, in fact Herr Rudolf Diesel went to America to promote his engines that could be fuelled by crops grown on the farm squeezed for SVO or to make bio-diesel his engine has better low rev grunt) just after prohibition when making ethanol to fuel a petrol tractor was illegal.